Syriza capitulates to Troika; Golden Dawn is next (1) Syriza gives in to EU pressure re Sanctions on Russia (2) Syriza capitulates ton Debt; "It chose capitalism and it will be swept away by fascists". Golden Dawn is next. (3) Syriza rebels, led by Mariolos Glezos, accuse leaders of Betrayal (4) Syriza MEP Manolis Glezos calls on Greeks to rise up against Syriza acquiescence (5) Neoliberalism, the Killing Plague. Greece could look to Russia - Peter Koenig (6) Yanis Varoufakis says he's committed to Eurozone, to keep Golden Dawn fascists at bay (1) Syriza gives in to EU pressure re Sanctions on Russia From: Willem Wolters <willemwolters@me.com> Subject: EU wins Greek backing to extend Russia sanctions, delays decision on new steps | Reuters Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2015 11:12:28 +0100 Peter, The latest news is that Greece does support the EU sanctions against Russia. Apparently the new Syriza government could not resist the EU pressure and gave in. Willem Wolters, Nijmegen, The Netherlands http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/29/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSKBN0L22B720150129 EU wins Greek backing to extend Russia sanctions, delays decision on new steps BY ROBIN EMMOTT AND PAVEL POLITYUK BRUSSELS/KIEV Thu Jan 29, 2015 4:32pm EST (Reuters) - European Union foreign ministers extended existing sanctions against Russia on Thursday, holding off on tighter economic measures for now but winning the support of the new left-leaning government of Greece, whose position had been in doubt. The ministers agreed to extend until September travel bans and asset freezes imposed last year that had been due to expire. They also agreed to list the names of additional people who could be targeted with sanctions when they meet again on Feb. 9. They dropped language, however, about drawing up "further restrictive measures" that had appeared in a pre-meeting draft. The bloc's foreign policy chief said a decision on such measures would be left to EU leaders meeting next month. [...] The run-up to the Brussels talks was dominated by Greece, whose new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, took power on Monday and complained that his government had not been consulted before tighter sanctions were threatened. But at the meeting, colleagues said new foreign minister Nikos Kotzias had swiftly dispelled suggestions that Greece would automatically torpedo any sanctions effort. According to Italy's foreign minister, Kotzias announced to the meeting: "I am not a Russian puppet." He signed up to a sharply worded statement that declared Moscow responsible for the violence in eastern Ukraine and demanded it halt its backing for the separatists. CALLS FOR DELAY While the Greeks did call for the decision on tighter sanctions to be delayed, they were not alone: other countries such as Italy and Austria also favored a delay, diplomats said, while Britain and the Baltic states wanted a clearer commitment to imposing new sanctions quickly. "We are not against every sanction," Kotzias said later. "We are in the mainstream, we are not the bad boys." German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed frustration with the ambiguity of the Greek position before the talks: "It is no secret that the new stance of the Greek government has not made today's debate any easier," he said. After he met Kotzias in private, German officials said he was less concerned. [...] Tsipras has not made his position on Ukraine clear in public. His Syriza party has its roots in leftist movements, some of which were sympathetic to Moscow during the Cold War, and Russia's ambassador was the first foreign official Tsipras met after taking office on Monday. But Greece has also long treasured its membership of the Western NATO alliance. It shares Orthodox Christianity with both Russia and Ukraine, and many Greeks sympathize with both countries. (2) Syriza capitulates ton Debt; "It chose capitalism and it will be swept away by fascists". Golden Dawn is next. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/view-athens-why-left-shouldnt-put-all-its-faith-syriza A view from Athens: why the left shouldn't put all its faith in Syriza A Greek schoolteacher describes the response in Greece to Syriza's victory, and warns the European left to look closer at the triumphant party's "peculiar socialism". BY EVEL ECONOMAKIS PUBLISHED 23 FEBRUARY, 2015 - 14:38 On 25 January, Syriza, the left-wing party of Alexis Tsipras, won the national elections. That evening, my friend “Karma” (his nickname), a Greek-American living in Athens, sent me this text message: “I went downtown for the victory speech, and was blown away. We’re NOT in Kansas any more! No more Carmina Burana: they played Pink Floyd, The Clash, Bella Ciao, Springsteen and Patti Smith!” I texted Karma back, saying how glad I was, but also expressed my fears Syriza, an acronym that means “Coalition of the Radical Left”, would backpedal on its pre-election promises. “Yup,” my friend soon replied. “We’re all hoping for the best but Syriza’s proclaimed goal is not to overthrow the status quo. Instead, it wants to bargain for a kinder, gentler form of impalement.” Ours were minority views. In the week immediately following the victory, most people on the left rejoiced that better days had finally arrived for long-suffering Greece. By contrast, those with right-of-centre sympathies sounded the alarm that the new government would tax businesses into oblivion (many even cried: “They’ll take our houses from us!”) and that the country would unceremoniously be kicked out of the European Union. Similarly outside Greece: socialist voters across Europe are looking to Syriza to provide hope in a continent with more than its fair share of right-wing governments. For right-wingers, however, the pre-election promises made to the Greek people by Tsipras are socialist, even extremist – a view projected by Angela Merkel in Berlin and the troika in Brussels and New York. There are many things progressive people find endearing about Syriza and its leaders. Like their vows to support the numerous grassroots initiatives that have sprung up since 2010, when the troika put the screws on Greece: soup kitchens, supermarket baskets where people can donate canned food, various socialist Craigslists offering all manner of goods and services free of charge. The laid-back dress code of Syriza ministers has also been praised here, as has their refusal to travel first class, or accept perks the ministers of previous governments enjoyed, including limos, chauffeurs and bodyguards. Syriza came to power on the pledge that it would renounce the country’s ?327bn debt, kick out the troika bailiffs and put an end to austerity that has plagued the country for the last five years. Ever since 25 January, the government has pledged to stop taxing the very poor, prohibit the confiscation of homes by banks, halt the privatisation of two ports in Greece, increase the minimum wage and rehire some public sector workers. A wonderful, fresh new wind is blowing here. Just the other day, upon returning to his office in the parliament building from a lightning trip to Berlin to argue for kinder, gentler treatment, Prime Minister Tsipras found an envelope on his desk with ?550 in it – reimbursement for his airline ticket. “What’s this?” he asked his aides. When told, he returned the cash to the government’s coffers and instructed his people to put an end to such practices. Many in Greece are equally impressed with Minister of Finance Yannis Varoufakis. Last week, a liberal blogger spotted him at 1.30am, walking alone on Amalias Avenue near Syntagma Square, pulling a wheeled travel bag and talking on his hands-free kit. Social media immediately caught fire: “Be careful Yannis, we don’t have many like you!” and “What are you doing late at night with no security, man? Remember, you are our Minister of Finance!” Everyone here knows Varoufakis is the scion of an extremely wealthy family (his father was president of Halivourgiki, Greece’s second-largest steel producer). Few hold his background against him. After all, as one blogger noted, “history is full of examples of rich people who betrayed their class and sided with the less fortunate, and Varoufakis has described himself as a Marxist.” But let’s give Syriza a closer look. The first question that’s on the lips of many on the left is why it chose ANEL, or the Party of Independent Greeks, for its junior partner in government. ANEL includes extreme right-wingers, with some members having been accused of making anti-Semitic statements and expressing a wish for immigants in Greece to “go back to their own countries”. Equally bizarre is Tsipras’ choice of Panagiotis Pavlopoulos for President of the Republic, announced on 17 February, a center-right politician who served as Interior Minister between 2004 and 2009. The odd make-up of the government is reflected in the way the ministers dress. While many refuse to wear ties, and some don’t even tuck their shirts in, others don three-piece suits. Varoufakis has been shuttling back and forth between Athens, Berlin and Brussels, hands cupped asking for money. He’s prompted a great deal of speculation about his untucked shirt and lack of a tie. The Cuban revolutionaries wore combat fatigues, which was fine because they told all their creditors to buzz off. That made sense. This does not. Syriza swept to power on Greek nationalist and anti-German rhetoric. How progressive is that? Not to mention that its demands – though laudable – are actually quite modest. All these self-described “radical leftists” have put on the European table is the request to spend less on interest and more on things like healthcare and aid to the destitute. Great stuff, but it isn’t socialism. If it is, then Barack Obama is a socialist too. For the past three years, Varoufakis has spoken to diverse audiences ranging from anti-austerity demonstrators in Athens’ Syntagma Square, staff at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Green parliamentarians in the European parliament, Bloomberg analysts in London and New York, the House of Commons in London, and hedge funds in Manhattan and London’s City. The one group he has not spoken to are simple working people. This is odd, to say the least, for a self-proclaimed Marxist, even an erratic one. He also adopted Merkelist propaganda in a recent interview addressed to the German public, when he said they, “paid so much money to Greeks”. Quite the contrary, no money came to the Greek people; instead it went to usurers and the bankocracy. The average Greek, whose monthly income is well below that of most Europeans, was – and still is – compelled to pay interest rates needed to service loans that save no one but German, French, US, Chinese, and – yes – Greek bankers. Personally, my wife and I, who are fortunate enough to have jobs (we are both teachers) have been driven to the wall by all sorts of new taxes we can’t afford to pay. Our two young children have long ago become accustomed to the fact that their parents can’t buy them new clothes, or toys, or even go out once in a while to a restaurant together. Many people who are to the left of Syriza – the KKE, or Communist Party of Greece, and Antarsia (this acronym spells “rebellion”), a conglomeration of Trotskyists and other extreme Marxists – are highly critical of Varoufakis’ declarations that he does not want to replace capitalism with socialism. By his own admission, he is embarking upon a campaign for stabilizing the European socio-economic system to avoid the ascendency of right-wing Golden Dawn racist fanatics. He says he is adamantly against the disintegration of the Eurozone. His critics to the left accuse him of practising a modern-day form of appeasement. They argue that fascism is born of capitalism in crisis and that you can’t save the system from the fascists because fascists aren’t anti-capitalists and pose no threat to capitalism. Greece’s Minister of Finance has surprised supporters by saying he wants alliances “even with right-wingers”. He describes as “genuinely radical” his pursuit of a “modest agenda for stabilising a system that I despise”, and admits to “running the risk of surreptitiously lessening the sadness from ditching any hope of replacing capitalism in my lifetime by indulging a feeling of having become agreeable to the circles of polite society”. Not surprisingly, many to the left of Syriza, but also increasing voices from within the party, bemoan the fact that an increasing number of mega-capitalists have recently come forward to say they support Tsipras’ new government – people like shipping and steel magnate George Angelopoulos and petroleum and banking tycoon Spiros Latsis. Varoufakis claims he wants to save capitalism for “strategic purposes”, from itself. Nowhere does he mention what he, Tsipras and Syriza intend to do once they have “saved” capitalism. How sweet this must all sound to big businessmen and bankers in Athens, London, Berlin, Paris, Madrid and New York. Will the new government in Athens move dynamically against Berlin and Brussels? Strange as it sounds, if Syriza has the guts to do so, it will have the support of the ultra-nationalist bigots. This in turn will blunt the neo-Nazis and sharpen the left. If Tsipras’ government does not, the cannibals will return with a vengeance once it falls. Is the real dilemma between capitalism and fascism, as Varoufakis suggests? Or does Greece, indeed the planet, desperately need a more humane, reasonable and responsible way of managing its human and natural resources? Many people here are praying Syriza has opened a door no one can shut; they hope the new government in Athens will infect Europe with a new democratic ethos that will wipe away the unfair trade relations between southern Europe and the stronger powers in Berlin and Paris. But how will this alter the reality that the world is in a deep depression? How will this save us all from the sight of the smoke of our world burning, from another world war, or – which is more likely – a move towards a new, modern form of feudalism? My friend Karma texted me yesterday: “Syriza,” he said, “was given the choice between capitalism and socialism. It chose capitalism and it will be swept away by fascists.” His words of wisdom confirmed to me I’d voted the right way in January. It had crossed my mind to cast my ballot for Syriza, but when I walked into the polling station (the local primary school), I was set on either Antarsia or the KKE. In the end, I chose the Communist Party for the simple reason that despite its conservative, self-serving and sluggish leadership, this is the only party in Greece with legions of simple working people in it, people who are disciplined and operate as a cohesive group. Who else will stand up effectively to the barbarians of Golden Dawn? (3) Syriza rebels, led by Mariolos Glezos, accuse leaders of Betrayal From: "Tom Mysiewicz tgmy7@hotmail.com [shamireaders]" <shamireaders@yahoogroups.com> Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 10:49:09 -0800 Subject: [shamireaders] Fw: [New post] OXI! SAYS MANIOLIS GLEZOS TO BAILOUT BETRAYAL. NO! NOTE: Most of the “Greek Debt” was incurred through bailing out private “too big to fail” banking institutions after 2008. As such (like the “Irish debt”) it should be repudiated. Tspiras and Varoufakis pulled a fast one in the loan extension—they accepted the legitimacy of the debt. Since they were a new government elected to repudiate the debt they were given an opportunity to do so and waived it. Is it any wonder now as to why Golden Dawn was jailed before the election? Perhaps the next Greek government will exercise its right to repudiate the 90% of Greek debt that is private-bank-bailout related. Good analysis in the following article from Austria. https://birdflu666.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/oxi-says-maniolis-glezos-to-bailout-betrayal-no/ Oxi! says Maniolis Glezos to Bailout Betrayal. No! by Jane Burgermeister February 23, 2015 at 12:55 pm The betrayal of the newly-minted Greek Prime Minister and Syriza leader Alexis Tspiras and his side kick, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has been complete. One month after being elected to stop the Troika and banker-imposed austerity, controlled opposition Tspiras and Varoufakis agreed to continue the very same policies of debt enslavement with only minor adjustments in a deal Brussels. http://in.reuters.com/article/2015/02/23/us-eurozone-greece-germany-insight-idINKBN0LQ0K520150223 The theatrical negotiations were all in a days work for the pair of actors and media darlings Tspiras and Varoufakis. Only now the Greek people do not have time to hang around wait. They need relief from the crushing debt burden today. After pretending to go through painful and difficult negotiations, the duo of Tspiras and Varoufakis thought up the ruse of renaming the "Troika" as "Institutions" before they signed the new bailout deal with a flourish on Friday. It is difficult to see how the Rock Stars -- as they are called by the mainstream media -- could have thought the Greek people would not notice the two words dented exactly the same thing. A call to friends in the media to publish high fake poll ratings may have seemed an easy option to cushion the drop in public support. Remember German newspaper Bild's obviously fake poll ratings during the Guttenberg plagiarism scandal? But things have turned out differently.The fact is there is no support for Tspiras and Varoufakis. They have no Rock Star appeal or charisma. There is support for an end to austerity. If Tspiras and Varoufakis do not deliver on their election promisses to end the banker debt slavery, Tspiras and Varoufakis must go. Syriza has started to revolt led by Mariolos Glezos. After the shameless betrayal byTspiras and Varoufakis, Syriza must should Manilos Glezos as their leader and constitute a new government. An alternative to debt slavery in the crumbling eurozone is an exit. The Drachma as a currency issued by the government can be the basis for restoring prosperity if there are inflation controls and forgery proof notes, as this blog has argued. The alternative to the Drachma is the complete and utter impoverishment and, ultimately, extermination of the Greek people. (4) Syriza MEP Manolis Glezos calls on Greeks to rise up against Syriza acquiescence http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/02/22/syriza-mep-glezos-apologizes-to-greek-people-for-contributing-to-an-illusion/ SYRIZA MEP Glezos Apologizes to Greek People for ‘Contributing to an Illusion’ Manolis Glezos’ article is as follows Renaming the Troika into “Institutions,” the Memorandum of Understanding into “Agreement” and the lenders into “partners,” you do not change the previous situations as in the case renaming “meat” to “fish.” Of course, you cannot change the vote of the Greek people at the elections of January 25, 2015. The people voted in favor of what SYRIZA promised: to remove the austerity which is not the only strategy of the oligarchic Germany and the other EU countries, but also the strategy of the Greek oligarchy. To remove the Memoranda and the Troika, abolish all laws of austerity. The next day after the elections, we abolish per law the Troika and its consequences. Now a month has passed and the promises have not turned into practice. Pity. And pity, again. On my part, I APOLOGIZE to the Greek people because I have contributed to this illusion. Before it is too late, though, we should react. First of all, SYRIZA members, friends and supporters at all levels of organizations should decide in extraordinary meetings whether they accept this situation. Some argue that to reach an agreement, you have to retreat. First: There can be no compromise between the oppressor and oppressed. Between the slave and the occupier the only solution is Freedom. But even if we accept this absurdity, the concessions already made by the previous pro-austerity governments in terms of unemployment, austerity, poverty, suicides have gone beyond the limits. Manolis Glezos, Brussels February 22, 2015 (5) Neoliberalism, the Killing Plague. Greece could look to Russia - Peter Koenig Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 06:48:59 +0300 From: Debbie Menon <debbiemenon@gmail.com> Greece has various options writes Peter Koenig. Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He is the author of Implosion: An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41088.htm http://www.globalresearch.ca/greece-syriza-subservience-to-neoliberalism-the-killing-plague-that-knows-no-mercy/5433045 Greece — Syriza – Subservience to Neoliberalism – The Killing Plague that Knows No Mercy? by Peter Koenig Global Research, February 24, 2015 To begin with, let’s be clear, neoliberalism is a criminal, murderous plague that knows no mercy. Neoliberalism is the root of (almost) all evil of the 21st Century. Neoliberalism is the cause for most current wars, conflicts and civil strife around the globe. Neoliberalism is the expression of abject greed for accumulation of resources by a few, for which tens of millions of people have to die. Neoliberalism and its feudal banking system, led by Wall Street and its intricate network of international finance, steals public infrastructure, public safety nets – public investments paid for by nations’ citizens – robs nations of their resources (labor, physical resources above-and underground) – by avid schemes of privatization, justified under the pretext of ‘structural reforms’ to ‘salvage’ poor but often resources-rich countries from bankruptcy. Rescue by structural reform or adjustment is synonymous with deceit. Even IMF chief, Christine Lagarde, admitted that the model failed in Greece, thereby admitting that the notion of ‘austerity’ for the poor as a means for economic recovery is not working. – No news to most of us. The neoliberal concept is no innovation of today. It was born in the 1930s in Europe as a response (sic) to the US depression of the 1930s. It was initially thought of as a moderate form of giving the private sector more liberty for initiatives and investments, while limiting government control. The concept was revamped after WWII in Washington rightwing think tanks (sic), such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, Political Economy Research Centre and the like. In the UK developing hard-core neoliberalism was mostly in the domain of the Institute of Economic Affairs. Prominent, mostly Zionist ‘scholars’ elaborated the idea through the sixties and seventies into a market fundamentalism which was launched in the 1980s in the United States under President Reagan and in Europe under UK’s Prime Minister Thatcher. The concept culminated in the so-called Washington Consensus in 1989, depicting a series of ‘everything-goes’ market reform policies, to be adopted by the Washington based financial institutions, World Bank, IDB, IMF, FED, US Treasury. Since then, neoliberalism has engulfed the world like brushfire. It knows no boundaries. It is influencing world economies like no other economic concept did before. If not by physical weapons and bloodletting wars, neoliberalism is also devastating lives, causing misery, destroying entire nations, by its financial instruments, chiefly represented by the Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank and International Monetary Fund – and lately also the European Central Bank (ECB), the economic sledgehammer of the European Union’s 19 Eurozone countries. The IMF, ECB and the European Commission (EC) have become known as the infamous ‘troika’, the cause for economic strangulation of the southern European nations – Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland – and even Italy. Case in point is Greece. Last Friday, 20 February, Greece’s newly elected Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, and his Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, of Syriza, the alliance of so-called left-wing parties, went through a marathon session of attempted negotiations with Brussels over her ? 240 billion plus debt, due at the end of February 2015. They asked for a 6-month extension without any strings attached, meaning – no more socially debilitating austerity programs. Perhaps they were dreaming, or simply not listening to the utter arrogant advance warnings of Brussels’ elitist neoliberal talking heads, especially Germany’s financial hawk, Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schäuble, and the ultra-neoliberal chairman of the group of the 19 Eurozone finance chiefs, Jeroen Dijsselbloem. The latter said that Athens had given its “unequivocal commitment to honour their financial obligations” to creditors, and he will hold her to the promise. This commitment refers to Mr.Tsipras’ predecessor’s, Mr. Alekos Alavanos, Letter of Agreement signed with the EU. The result was predictable. Tsipras who campaigned under the radical but noble stand of ‘no concessions’ to the lords of Brussels, and his Finance Minister, caved in miserably. They did not get a six months extension, but only 4 months – under the condition that Greece submits a comprehensive list of reforms and reform mechanisms byMonday night, 23 February; basically the same list of austerity measures agreed upon by Tsipras’ predecessor. Implementation of the reforms would be supervised by the troika. At the outset, Tsipras-Varoufakis meekly accepted the EU conditions. As James Petras puts it in “The Assassination of Greece”: “Every major financial institution – the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the IMF – toes the line: no dissent or deviation is allowed. Greece must accept EU dictates or face major financial reprisals. “Economic strangulation or perpetual debt peonage” is the lesson which Brussels tends to all member states of the EU. While ostensibly speaking to Greece – it is a message directed to all states, opposition movements and trade unions who call into question the dictates of the Brussels oligarchy and its Berlin overlords.” During Friday, 20 February, while the financial marathon rambled on in Brussels, one billion euros were withdrawn from Geek banks, in anticipation of failed negotiations and possible expulsion of Greece from the Eurozone – the so-called Grexit. It is unclear how Tsipras-Varoufakis are going to explain the hapless result brought back from Brussels to their electorate. It must remind those who can still remember how Andreas Papandreou, member of the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party, elected as first PM after Greece was admitted in 1980 to the EU, betrayed his constituency. He promised them that Greece would exit NATO and the European Economic Community, that Greece would develop her own economy with economic growth at her pace. Soon after election he reneged on both promises. – Will the Greek people buy the Tsipras-Varoufakis ‘explanations’ for not honoring Syriza’s pre-election commitments? Greece has various options. Tsipras-Varoufakis must know them. Perhaps they keep them hidden away until “the last ditch” moment. To begin with, they could have imposed and still can impose strict capital transfer controls, to avoid the outflow of precious capital from Greek oligarchs, capital that eventually is missing for rebuilding Greece’s economy and would need to be replaced by new debt. Although, this is basically against EU’s rule of free transfer of capital, Greece as a sovereign country, can roll back its EU vassal status, take back its sovereignty and do what every reasonable central bank would do in Greece’s situation – impose capital transfer restrictions. After all, the Euro is also – and still is – Greece’s currency. The EU might not like it – nor would the Greek oligarchs – but it would be a bold step in the right direction. And should it result in Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s and Germany’s Wolfgang Schäuble’s boisterous threats of ‘sanctions’ – then so be it. – Why not call their bluff? – Submitting a letter on Monday that says just that – we are happy to accept your extension of 4 months, but are morally, socially and economically unable to meet your conditions of austerity. Period. The EU has no interest whatsoever in a Greek exit. In fact, they are afraid of a Grexit, not only because of a potential default on the Greek debt, but it could open a floodgate for other southern European countries in distress to follow the Greek example. That would be the end of the Euro as we know it. It might be the final blow to the dollar-euro house of cards, house of casino money. Tsipras–Varoufakis should stick to their promise – no more austerity programs. No more privatizations of public property, no more cuts in pensions and salaries; to the contrary, rolling back the cuts already administered, bringing back decent life conditions to the Greek people, gradually averting the illegal troika imposed misery. Greece’s debt today stands at 175 % of her economic output. The best – and only decent and socially as well as economically viable option – is exiting the Eurozone by her own decision. Greece would be declared bankrupt. The Anglo-Saxon rating agencies would be quick in down-grading Greece financially to ‘junk’. The financial markets would shun her. No more money, but utmost pressure to repay what they can. Greece would be in the enviable position of negotiating debt repayment at HER own terms – à la Argentina in 2001. No country can be left to starve, especially when the debt was contracted illegally or under coercion. International law allows renegotiation of such contracts – contracts signed under pressure or by corrupt governments. Finally – or perhaps refreshingly – Greece could look east, to the Russia-China alliance. Their assistance under much more reasonable conditions is virtually assured. – Why insisting on following a defunct predatory system, when there are new promising development potentials looming on the horizon? Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik News, the Voice of Russia / Ria Novosti, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. (6) Yanis Varoufakis says he's committed to Eurozone, to keep Golden Dawn fascists at bay Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2015 18:45:00 +0900 Subject: Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist | News | The Guardian From: chris lancenet <chrislancenet@gmail.com> http://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist Wednesday 18 February 2015 17.00 AEDT Last modified on Wednesday 18 February 2015 22.54 AEDT Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis, the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at the centre of the latest eurozone standoff, wrote this searing account of European capitalism and and how the left can learn from Marx’s mistakes In 2008, capitalism had its second global spasm. The financial crisis set off a chain reaction that pushed Europe into a downward spiral that continues to this day. Europe’s present situation is not merely a threat for workers, for the dispossessed, for the bankers, for social classes or, indeed, nations. No, Europe’s current posture poses a threat to civilisation as we know it. If my prognosis is correct, and we are not facing just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome, the question that arises for radicals is this: should we welcome this crisis of European capitalism as an opportunity to replace it with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism? To me, the answer is clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to give birth to a better alternative to capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come. For this view I have been accused, by well-meaning radical voices, of being “defeatist” and of trying to save an indefensible European socioeconomic system. This criticism, I confess, hurts. And it hurts because it contains more than a kernel of truth. I share the view that this European Union is typified by a large democratic deficit that, in combination with the denial of the faulty architecture of its monetary union, has put Europe’s peoples on a path to permanent recession. And I also bow to the criticism that I have campaigned on an agenda founded on the assumption that the left was, and remains, squarely defeated. I confess I would much rather be promoting a radical agenda, the raison d’être of which is to replace European capitalism with a different system. Yet my aim here is to offer a window into my view of a repugnant European capitalism whose implosion, despite its many ills, should be avoided at all costs. It is a confession intended to convince radicals that we have a contradictory mission: to arrest the freefall of European capitalism in order to buy the time we need to formulate its alternative. Why a Marxist? When I chose the subject of my doctoral thesis, back in 1982, I deliberately focused on a highly mathematical topic within which Marx’s thought was irrelevant. When, later on, I embarked on an academic career, as a lecturer in mainstream economics departments, the implicit contract between myself and the departments that offered me lectureships was that I would be teaching the type of economic theory that left no room for Marx. In the late 1980s, I was hired by the University of Sydney’s school of economics in order to keep out a leftwing candidate (although I did not know this at the time). Yanis Varoufakis: ‘Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day.’ Photograph: PA After I returned to Greece in 2000, I threw my lot in with the future prime minister George Papandreou, hoping to help stem the return to power of a resurgent right wing that wanted to push Greece towards xenophobia both domestically and in its foreign policy. As the whole world now knows, Papandreou’s party not only failed to stem xenophobia but, in the end, presided over the most virulent neoliberal macroeconomic policies that spearheaded the eurozone’s so-called bailouts thus, unwittingly, causing the return of Nazis to the streets of Athens. Even though I resigned as Papandreou’s adviser early in 2006, and turned into his government’s staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism. Given all this, you may be puzzled to hear me call myself a Marxist. But, in truth, Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day. This is not something that I often volunteer to talk about in “polite society” because the very mention of the M-word switches audiences off. But I never deny it either. After a few years of addressing audiences with whom I do not share an ideology, a need has crept up on me to talk about Marx’s imprint on my thinking. To explain why, while an unapologetic Marxist, I think it is important to resist him passionately in a variety of ways. To be, in other words, erratic in one’s Marxism. If my whole academic career largely ignored Marx, and my current policy recommendations are impossible to describe as Marxist, why bring up my Marxism now? The answer is simple: Even my non-Marxist economics was guided by a mindset influenced by Marx. A radical social theorist can challenge the economic mainstream in two different ways, I always thought. One way is by means of immanent criticism. To accept the mainstream’s axioms and then expose its internal contradictions. To say: “I shall not contest your assumptions but here is why your own conclusions do not logically flow on from them.” This was, indeed, Marx’s method of undermining British political economics. He accepted every axiom by Adam Smith and David Ricardo in order to demonstrate that, in the context of their assumptions, capitalism was a contradictory system. The second avenue that a radical theorist can pursue is, of course, the construction of alternative theories to those of the establishment, hoping that they will be taken seriously. My view on this dilemma has always been that the powers that be are never perturbed by theories that embark from assumptions different to their own. The only thing that can destabilise and genuinely challenge mainstream, neoclassical economists is the demonstration of the internal inconsistency of their own models. It was for this reason that, from the very beginning, I chose to delve into the guts of neoclassical theory and to spend next to no energy trying to develop alternative, Marxist models of capitalism. My reasons, I submit, were quite Marxist. When called upon to comment on the world we live in, I had no alternative but to fall back on Marxist tradition When called upon to comment on the world we live in, I had no alternative but to fall back on the Marxist tradition which had shaped my thinking ever since my metallurgist father impressed upon me, when I was still a child, the effect of technological innovation on the historical process. How, for instance, the passage from the bronze age to the iron age sped up history; how the discovery of steel greatly accelerated historical time; and how silicon-based IT technologies are fast-tracking socioeconomic and historical discontinuities. My first encounter with Marx’s writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74. What caught my eye was Marx’s mesmerising gift for writing a dramatic script for human history, indeed for human damnation, that was also laced with the possibility of salvation and authentic spirituality. Marx created a narrative populated by workers, capitalists, officials and scientists who were history’s dramatis personae. They struggled to harness reason and science in the context of empowering humanity while, contrary to their intentions, unleashing demonic forces that usurped and subverted their own freedom and humanity. This dialectical perspective, where everything is pregnant with its opposite, and the eager eye with which Marx discerned the potential for change in what seemed to be the most unchanging of social structures, helped me to grasp the great contradictions of the capitalist era. It dissolved the paradox of an age that generated the most remarkable wealth and, in the same breath, the most conspicuous poverty. Today, turning to the European crisis, the crisis in the United States and the long-term stagnation of Japanese capitalism, most commentators fail to appreciate the dialectical process under their nose. They recognise the mountain of debts and banking losses but neglect the opposite side of the same coin: the mountain of idle savings that are “frozen” by fear and thus fail to convert into productive investments. A Marxist alertness to binary oppositions might have opened their eyes. A major reason why established opinion fails to come to terms with contemporary reality is that it never understood the dialectically tense “joint production” of debts and surpluses, of growth and unemployment, of wealth and poverty, indeed of good and evil. Marx’s script alerted us these binary oppositions as the sources of history’s cunning. From my first steps of thinking like an economist, to this very day, it occurred to me that Marx had made a discovery that must remain at the heart of any useful analysis of capitalism. It was the discovery of another binary opposition deep within human labour. Between labour’s two quite different natures: i) labour as a value-creating activity that can never be quantified in advance (and is therefore impossible to commodify), and ii) labour as a quantity (eg, numbers of hours worked) that is for sale and comes at a price. That is what distinguishes labour from other productive inputs such as electricity: its twin, contradictory, nature. A differentiation-cum-contradiction that political economics neglected to make before Marx came along and that mainstream economics is steadfastly refusing to acknowledge today. Both electricity and labour can be thought of as commodities. Indeed, both employers and workers struggle to commodify labour. Employers use all their ingenuity, and that of their HR management minions, to quantify, measure and homogenise labour. Meanwhile, prospective employees go through the wringer in an anxious attempt to commodify their labour power, to write and rewrite their CVs in order to portray themselves as purveyors of quantifiable labour units. And there’s the rub. If workers and employers ever succeed in commodifying labour fully, capitalism will perish. This is an insight without which capitalism’s tendency to generate crises can never be fully grasped and, also, an insight that no one has access to without some exposure to Marx’s thought. Science fiction becomes documentary In the classic 1953 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the alien force does not attack us head on, unlike in, say, HG Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Instead, people are taken over from within, until nothing is left of their human spirit and emotions. Their bodies are shells that used to contain a free will and which now labour, go through the motions of everyday “life”, and function as human simulacra “liberated” from the unquantifiable essence of human nature. This is something like what would have transpired if human labour had become perfectly reducible to human capital and thus fit for insertion into the vulgar economists’ models. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Photograph: SNAP/REX Every non-Marxist economic theory that treats human and non-human productive inputs as interchangeable assumes that the dehumanisation of human labour is complete. But if it could ever be completed, the result would be the end of capitalism as a system capable of creating and distributing value. For a start, a society of dehumanised automata would resemble a mechanical watch full of cogs and springs, each with its own unique function, together producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that society contained nothing but other automata, timekeeping would not be a “good”. It would certainly be an “output” but why a “good”? Without real humans to experience the clock’s function, there can be no such thing as “good” or “bad”. If capital ever succeeds in quantifying, and subsequently fully commodifying, labour, as it is constantly trying to, it will also squeeze that indeterminate, recalcitrant human freedom from within labour that allows for the generation of value. Marx’s brilliant insight into the essence of capitalist crises was precisely this: the greater capitalism’s success in turning labour into a commodity the less the value of each unit of output it generates, the lower the profit rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next recession of the economy as a system. The portrayal of human freedom as an economic category is unique in Marx, making possible a distinctively dramatic and analytically astute interpretation of capitalism’s propensity to snatch recession, even depression, from the jaws of growth. When Marx was writing that labour is the living, form-giving fire; the transitoriness of things; their temporality; he was making the greatest contribution any economist has ever made to our understanding of the acute contradiction buried inside capitalism’s DNA. When he portrayed capital as a “… force we must submit to … it develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy which breaks through every limit and every bond and posts itself as the only policy, the only universality the only limit and the only bond”, he was highlighting the reality that labour can be purchased by liquid capital (ie money), in its commodity form, but that it will always carry with it a will hostile to the capitalist buyer. But Marx was not just making a psychological, philosophical or political statement. He was, rather, supplying a remarkable analysis of why the moment that labour (as an unquantifiable activity) sheds this hostility, it becomes sterile, incapable of producing value. At a time when neoliberals have ensnared the majority in their theoretical tentacles, incessantly regurgitating the ideology of enhancing labour productivity in an effort to enhance competitiveness with a view to creating growth etc, Marx’s analysis offers a powerful antidote. Capital can never win in its struggle to turn labour into an infinitely elastic, mechanised input, without destroying itself. That is what neither the neoliberals nor the Keynesians will ever grasp. “If the whole class of the wage-labourer were to be annihilated by machinery”, wrote Marx “how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labour, ceases to be capital!” What has Marx done for us? Almost all schools of thought, including those of some progressive economists, like to pretend that, though Marx was a powerful figure, very little of his contribution remains relevant today. I beg to differ. Besides having captured the basic drama of capitalist dynamics, Marx has given me the tools with which to become immune to the toxic propaganda of neoliberalism. For example, the idea that wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state, through taxation, is easy to succumb to if one has not been exposed first to Marx’s poignant argument that precisely the opposite applies: wealth is collectively produced and then privately appropriated through social relations of production and property rights that rely, for their reproduction, almost exclusively on false consciousness. In his recent book Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, the historian of economic thought, Philip Mirowski, has highlighted the neoliberals’ success in convincing a large array of people that markets are not just a useful means to an end but also an end in themselves. According to this view, while collective action and public institutions are never able to “get it right”, the unfettered operations of decentralised private interest are guaranteed to produce not only the right outcomes but also the right desires, character, ethos even. The best example of this form of neoliberal crassness is, of course, the debate on how to deal with climate change. Neoliberals have rushed in to argue that, if anything is to be done, it must take the form of creating a quasi-market for “bads” (eg an emissions trading scheme), since only markets “know” how to price goods and bads appropriately. To understand why such a quasi-market solution is bound to fail and, more importantly, where the motivation comes from for such “solutions”, one can do much worse than to become acquainted with the logic of capital accumulation that Marx outlined and the Polish economist Michal Kalecki adapted to a world ruled by networked oligopolies. Neoliberals have rushed in with quasi-market responses to climate change, such as emissions trading schemes. Photograph: Jon Woo/Reuters In the 20th century, the two political movements that sought their roots in Marx’s thought were the communist and social democratic parties. Both of them, in addition to their other errors (and, indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment, to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard: instead of embracing liberty and rationality as their rallying cries and organising concepts, they opted for equality and justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The problem with capitalism is not that it is unfair but that it is irrational, as it habitually condemns whole generations to deprivation and unemployment and even turns capitalists into angst-ridden automata, living in permanent fear that unless they commodify their fellow humans fully so as to serve capital accumulation more efficiently, they will cease to be capitalists. So, if capitalism appears unjust this is because it enslaves everyone; it wastes human and natural resources; the same production line that pumps out remarkable gizmos and untold wealth, also produces deep unhappiness and crises. Having failed to couch a critique of capitalism in terms of freedom and rationality, as Marx thought essential, social democracy and the left in general allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph in the contest of ideologies. Perhaps the most significant dimension of the neoliberal triumph is what has come to be known as the “democratic deficit”. Rivers of crocodile tears have flowed over the decline of our great democracies during the past three decades of financialisation and globalisation. Marx would have laughed long and hard at those who seem surprised, or upset, by the “democratic deficit”. What was the great objective behind 19th-century liberalism? It was, as Marx never tired of pointing out, to separate the economic sphere from the political sphere and to confine politics to the latter while leaving the economic sphere to capital. It is liberalism’s splendid success in achieving this long-held goal that we are now observing. Take a look at South Africa today, more than two decades after Nelson Mandela was freed and the political sphere, at long last, embraced the whole population. The ANC’s predicament was that, in order to be allowed to dominate the political sphere, it had to give up power over the economic one. And if you think otherwise, I suggest that you talk to the dozens of miners gunned down by armed guards paid by their employers after they dared demand a wage rise. Why erratic? Having explained why I owe whatever understanding of our social world I may possess largely to Karl Marx, I now want to explain why I remain terribly angry with him. In other words, I shall outline why I am by choice an erratic, inconsistent Marxist. Marx committed two spectacular mistakes, one of them an error of omission, the other one of commission. Even today, these mistakes still hamper the left’s effectiveness, especially in Europe. Marx’s first error – the error of omission was that he failed to give sufficient thought to the impact of his own theorising on the world that he was theorising about. His theory is discursively exceptionally powerful, and Marx had a sense of its power. So how come he showed no concern that his disciples, people with a better grasp of these powerful ideas than the average worker, might use the power bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in order to abuse other comrades, to build their own power base, to gain positions of influence? Marx’s second error, the one I ascribe to commission, was worse. It was his assumption that truth about capitalism could be discovered in the mathematics of his models. This was the worst disservice he could have delivered to his own theoretical system. The man who equipped us with human freedom as a first-order economic concept; the scholar who elevated radical indeterminacy to its rightful place within political economics; he was the same person who ended up toying around with simplistic algebraic models, in which labour units were, naturally, fully quantified, hoping against hope to evince from these equations some additional insights about capitalism. After his death, Marxist economists wasted long careers indulging a similar type of scholastic mechanism. Fully immersed in irrelevant debates on “the transformation problem” and what to do about it, they eventually became an almost extinct species, as the neoliberal juggernaut crushed all dissent in its path. How could Marx be so deluded? Why did he not recognise that no truth about capitalism can ever spring out of any mathematical model, however brilliant the modeller may be? Did he not have the intellectual tools to realise that capitalist dynamics spring from the unquantifiable part of human labour; ie from a variable that can never be well-defined mathematically? Of course he did, since he forged these tools! No, the reason for his error is a little more sinister: just like the vulgar economists that he so brilliantly admonished (and who continue to dominate the departments of economics today), he coveted the power that mathematical “proof” afforded him. Why did Marx not recognise that no truth about capitalism can ever spring out of any mathematical model? If I am right, Marx knew what he was doing. He understood, or had the capacity to know, that a comprehensive theory of value cannot be accommodated within a mathematical model of a dynamic capitalist economy. He was, I have no doubt, aware that a proper economic theory must respect the idea that the rules of the undetermined are themselves undetermined. In economic terms this meant a recognition that the market power, and thus the profitability, of capitalists was not necessarily reducible to their capacity to extract labour from employees; that some capitalists can extract more from a given pool of labour or from a given community of consumers for reasons that are external to Marx’s own theory. Alas, that recognition would be tantamount to accepting that his “laws” were not immutable. He would have to concede to competing voices in the trades union movement that his theory was indeterminate and, therefore, that his pronouncements could not be uniquely and unambiguously correct. That they were permanently provisional. This determination to have the complete, closed story, or model, the final word, is something I cannot forgive Marx for. It proved, after all, responsible for a great deal of error and, more significantly, authoritarianism. Errors and authoritarianism that are largely responsible for the left’s current impotence as a force of good and as a check on the abuses of reason and liberty that the neoliberal crew are overseeing today. Mrs Thatcher’s lesson I moved to England to attend university in September 1978, six months or so before Margaret Thatcher’s victory changed Britain forever. Watching the Labour government disintegrate, under the weight of its degenerate social democratic programme, led me to a serious error: to the thought that Thatcher’s victory could be a good thing, delivering to Britain’s working and middle classes the short, sharp shock necessary to reinvigorate progressive politics; to give the left a chance to create a fresh, radical agenda for a new type of effective, progressive politics. Even as unemployment doubled and then trebled, under Thatcher’s radical neoliberal interventions, I continued to harbour hope that Lenin was right: “Things have to get worse before they get better.” As life became nastier, more brutish and, for many, shorter, it occurred to me that I was tragically in error: things could get worse in perpetuity, without ever getting better. The hope that the deterioration of public goods, the diminution of the lives of the majority, the spread of deprivation to every corner of the land would, automatically, lead to a renaissance of the left was just that: hope. The reality was, however, painfully different. With every turn of the recession’s screw, the left became more introverted, less capable of producing a convincing progressive agenda and, meanwhile, the working class was being divided between those who dropped out of society and those co-opted into the neoliberal mindset. My hope that Thatcher would inadvertently bring about a new political revolution was well and truly bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism were extreme financialisation, the triumph of the shopping mall over the corner store, the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair. Margaret Thatcher at the Conservative party conference in 1982. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features Instead of radicalising British society, the recession that Thatcher’s government so carefully engineered, as part of its class war against organised labour and against the public institutions of social security and redistribution that had been established after the war, permanently destroyed the very possibility of radical, progressive politics in Britain. Indeed, it rendered impossible the very notion of values that transcended what the market determined as the “right” price. The lesson Thatcher taught me about the capacity of a long?lasting recession to undermine progressive politics, is one that I carry with me into today’s European crisis. It is, indeed, the most important determinant of my stance in relation to the crisis. It is the reason I am happy to confess to the sin I am accused of by some of my critics on the left: the sin of choosing not to propose radical political programs that seek to exploit the crisis as an opportunity to overthrow European capitalism, to dismantle the awful eurozone, and to undermine the European Union of the cartels and the bankrupt bankers. Yes, I would love to put forward such a radical agenda. But, no, I am not prepared to commit the same error twice. What good did we achieve in Britain in the early 1980s by promoting an agenda of socialist change that British society scorned while falling headlong into Thatcher’s neoliberal trap? Precisely none. What good will it do today to call for a dismantling of the eurozone, of the European Union itself, when European capitalism is doing its utmost to undermine the eurozone, the European Union, indeed itself? A Greek or a Portuguese or an Italian exit from the eurozone would soon lead to a fragmentation of European capitalism, yielding a seriously recessionary surplus region east of the Rhine and north of the Alps, while the rest of Europe is would be in the grip of vicious stagflation. Who do you think would benefit from this development? A progressive left, that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Europe’s public institutions? Or the Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists, the xenophobes and the spivs? I have absolutely no doubt as to which of the two will do best from a disintegration of the eurozone. I, for one, am not prepared to blow fresh wind into the sails of this postmodern version of the 1930s. If this means that it is we, the suitably erratic Marxists, who must try to save European capitalism from itself, so be it. Not out of love for European capitalism, for the eurozone, for Brussels, or for the European Central Bank, but just because we want to minimise the unnecessary human toll from this crisis. What should Marxists do? Europe’s elites are behaving today as if they understand neither the nature of the crisis that they are presiding over, nor its implications for the future of European civilisation. Atavistically, they are choosing to plunder the diminishing stocks of the weak and the dispossessed in order to plug the gaping holes of the financial sector, refusing to come to terms with the unsustainability of the task. Yet with Europe’s elites deep in denial and disarray, the left must admit that we are just not ready to plug the chasm that a collapse of European capitalism would open up with a functioning socialist system. Our task should then be twofold. First, to put forward an analysis of the current state of play that non-Marxist, well meaning Europeans who have been lured by the sirens of neoliberalism, find insightful. Second, to follow this sound analysis up with proposals for stabilising Europe – for ending the downward spiral that, in the end, reinforces only the bigots. Let me now conclude with two confessions. First, while I am happy to defend as genuinely radical the pursuit of a modest agenda for stabilising a system that I criticise, I shall not pretend to be enthusiastic about it. This may be what we must do, under the present circumstances, but I am sad that I shall probably not be around to see a more radical agenda being adopted. Europe’s elites are behaving as if they understand neither the nature of the crisis, nor its implications for the future My final confession is of a highly personal nature: I know that I run the risk of, surreptitiously, lessening the sadness from ditching any hope of replacing capitalism in my lifetime by indulging a feeling of having become agreeable to the circles of polite society. The sense of self-satisfaction from being feted by the high and mighty did begin, on occasion, to creep up on me. And what a non-radical, ugly, corruptive and corrosive sense it was. My personal nadir came at an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited me to give a keynote speech on the European crisis and had forked out the ludicrous sum necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On my way back home, tired and with several flights under my belt, I was making my way past the long queue of economy passengers, to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with horror, how easy it was for my mind to be infected with the sense that I was entitled to bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how readily I could forget that which my leftwing mind had always known: that nothing succeeds in reproducing itself better than a false sense of entitlement. Forging alliances with reactionary forces, as I think we should do to stabilise Europe today, brings us up against the risk of becoming co-opted, of shedding our radicalism through the warm glow of having “arrived” in the corridors of power. Radical confessions, like the one I have attempted here, are perhaps the only programmatic antidote to ideological slippage that threatens to turn us into cogs of the machine. If we are to forge alliances with our political adversaries we must avoid becoming like the socialists who failed to change the world but succeeded in improving their private circumstances. The trick is to avoid the revolutionary maximalism that, in the end, helps the neoliberals bypass all opposition to their self-defeating policies and to retain in our sights capitalism’s inherent failures while trying to save it, for strategic purposes, from itself. This article is adapted from a lecture originally delivered at the 6th Subversive Festival in Zagreb in 2013 Follow the Long Read on Twitter: @gdnlongread Evel Masten Economakis has been living in a town 25km east of Athens since 2005. He teaches history, and also works in construction to supplement his family's income. His wife is also a teacher, and he has two children, aged 14 and ten -- Peter Myers Australia |
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