Yanis Varoufakis's Message to DiEM25 Members Injured in Paris
Nino, Remy and Violette,
I am writing to thank you. For what you did and for what you suffered. You have thousands of friends, comrades and admirers, DiEM25 members thinking of you throughout Europe.
The more authoritarian and violent they become, the more they resort to violence to maintain their failed policies, the more we know that they are feeling weak and that we are getting stronger.
Let us know what we, the rest of DiEM25, can do presently to ease your personal pain. Otherwise, we keep going.
For now, we salute you.
In solidarity
Yanis Varoufakis
See also: DiEM25 condemns police brutality in Paris
DiEM25 Condemns Police Brutality in Paris
In France, DiEM25 works alongside trade unions and many other associations in action against the labour reforms bill and more recently against the use of 49-3, the article which allows the government to force through this much contested law. This attempt to force the bill through prevents parliament performing its duties and is a blatant denial of democracy.
Protest movements such as the Nuit Debout, which has given citizens back their voice, continue to grow and the support of Yanis Varoufakis in Paris on 16th April was an important step for DiEM25 in France. The marches and the squares occupied by the Nuit Debout throughout France are made up of peaceful, non-violent protestors. The number of rioters is small and they are easily recognisable. Despite that, the police is now brutally attacking the demonstrations.
In Paris, we, members of DiEM25 were confined to a police controlled zone and closed in by a wall of Plexiglass. Then the police sprayed tear gas on a large scale. It was impossible to leave this area in spite of repeated requests. We saw a doctor being refused his request to evacuate somebody with breathing difficulties. We witnessed minors, asking to move away from the gas, being treated as potential terrorists.
The DiEM25 group were finally able to leave this Plexiglass cage after a long half an hour. Some of our members, in other parts of the march, were hit by police. One has three broken ribs.
We have heard similar stories from protests in other towns.
If, as according to Noam Chomsky, “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state”, we no longer know where to position ourselves because in France, we have both these problems.
We believe in the strength of ideas and remain mobilised so that our country once again sees the light that characterised it in the past.
France must rediscover its values and the “Demos” must once again find their place.
The DiEM25 fight for democracy is more than ever ours!
Carpe DiEM!
DiEM25 France
See also: Yanis Varoufakis’s message to DiEM25 members injured in Paris
Noam Chomsky for the refugee crisis
In some countries, there is a real refugee crisis. In Lebanon, for example, where perhaps one-quarter of the population consists of refugees from Syria, over and above a flood of refugees from Palestine and Iraq. Other poor and strife-ridden countries of the region have also absorbed huge numbers of refugees, among them Jordan, and Syria before its descent to collective suicide. The countries that are enduring a refugee crisis had no responsibility for creating it. Generating refugees is largely a responsibility of the rich and powerful, who now groan under the burden of a trickle of miserable victims whom they can easily accommodate.
The US-UK invasion of Iraq alone displaced some 4 million people, of whom almost half fled to neighboring countries. And Iraqis continue to flee from a country that is one of the most miserable on earth after a decade of murderous sanctions followed by the sledgehammer blows of the rich and powerful that devastated the ruined country and also ignited a sectarian conflict that is now tearing the country and the region to shreds.
There is no need to review the European role in Africa, the source of more refugees, now passing through the funnel created by the French-British-US bombing of Libya, which virtually destroyed the country and left it in the hands of warring militias. Or to review the US record in Central America, leaving horror chambers from which people are fleeing in terror and misery, joined now by Mexican victims of the trade pact which, predictably, destroyed Mexican agriculture, unable to compete with highly subsidized US agribusiness conglomerates.
The reaction of the rich and powerful United States is to pressure Mexico to keep US victims far from its own borders, and to drive them back mercilessly if they manage to evade the controls. The reaction of the rich and powerful European Union is to bribe and pressure Turkey to keep pathetic survivors from its borders and to herd those who escape into brutal camps.
Among citizens, there are honorable exceptions. But the reaction of the states is a moral disgrace, even putting aside their considerable responsibility for the circumstances that have compelled people to flee for their lives.
The shame is not new. Let us keep just to the United States, the most privileged and powerful country in the world, with incomparable advantages. Throughout most of its history it welcomed European refugees, to settle the lands taken by violence from the assassinated nations that dwelt in them. That changed with the Immigration Act of 1924, aimed at excluding particularly Italians and Jews. There is no need to dwell on their fate. Even after the war, survivors still confined to concentration camps were barred entry. Today, Roma are being expelled from France to horrible conditions in Eastern Europe, descendants of Holocaust victims, if anyone cares.
The shame is deep and persistent. The time has surely come to put it to an end and to try to attain some decent level of civilization.
Catholic Support for DiEM25 – should the Pope meet Yanis Varoufakis?
Abridged English translation of http://www.katholisches.info/2016/03/31/varoufakis-diem25-und-papst-franziskus/ . Photo by Edgar Jimenez, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
(Rome)
“In the last few days, a bizarre surprise hatched from the Easter edition of Avvenire, a daily newspaper owned by the Italian Episcopal Conference. And that surprise was called Yannis Varoufakis, the controversial economist and former Greek finance minister at the time the country was on the verge of the abyss.
On Holy Wednesday, Varoufakis made a pitstop in Rome to present his new political movement DiEM25. DiEM25 stands for Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. Its motto is: “The EU will either be democratised or it will disintegrate!”.
DIEM25’s aim is to achieve democratisation by 2025.
However, it is not only radicals and extreme left-wingers that support DiEM25, but also the Catholic daily Avvenire, the Italian Episcopal Conference newspaper. On Maundy Thursday, it published an enthusiastic whole-page interview with Varoufakis quoted him in the title:
“Europe has no soul. We stand before the final moral test.”
The former Greek Finance Minister and rising star of the radical left clarified in his own words how the unusual alliance between himself and the Catholic newspaper came about:
“I saw the Avvenire’s analysis by Fazio, the former president of the Italian Central Bank. Excellent! From time to time, there is somebody who proves me right…”
Antonio Fazio, the ex govenor of the Italian Central Bank, criticizes EU Economic Policy.
Varoufakis refers to a two-part article by Fazio published in Avennire two days prior to his arrival in Rome. Fazio who is an economist and a practising Catholic known for his outstanding knowledge of the writings of Thomas Aquinas, had several discussions with journalist Eugenio Fatigante which served as a basis for this article. Fatigante also interviewed Varoufakis.
In the first part, Fazio summarised the history of international and European economic policy during the 20th century in a way easily understood by laypeople. He particularly focused on the hyperinflation in Germany during the Weimar Republic in 1920s.
In the second part, he criticised current EU economic policy which seems to have an “almost crazy” fixation on currency stability only rather than on investment and economic growth. His reservations about Italian entry into the European Monetary Union (1996) and his country’s participation in the Euro introduced in 2002 are well-known .
Fazio’s principle argument is as follows:
“The economic surplus in the balance of payments of certain European countries (Germany as a prime example) should be employed for capital expenditure in their own country or in other EU countries and not be used for financial investments.”
To emphasize this, he referred directly to Varoufakis.
In his opinion, the former Greek finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis who has been severely criticised, understood things better than most. The basis for his argument is: “If, instead of using 300 billion for quantative easing (even if Mario Draghi was doing the right thing within the limits of the law), it should have been used for investment in the economy and not to buy government bonds thus covering an expense which others had already made. Therefore, if 300 billion each year were invested in projects chosen by the European Investment Bank – and the corresponding private bonds were bought by national central banks – then the economic situtation would be immediately improved.”
“This argument is rather controversial”, as Magister notes, and has more to do with an unusual accord between Varoufakis, and his DiEM25 Movement and the Catholic Avennire newspaper on the subject of “spirit” and “morality”.
Furthermore, according to Magister:
“It is notable how close the newspaper of the Episcopal Conference is to the political views of Pope Francis, who is fascinated by what he sees as ‘people’s movements’, e.g. No Global, No Expo, No Tav, No Triv, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Cocaleros, in short the, grassroots anti-capitalist movements that have sprung up everywhere. In the speeches which comprise his political manifesto – first the one in Rome in October 2014 and then the one in Bolivia in July 2015 – he saluted these movements as the avant-garde of a new humanity.”
In his apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium and his speech at World Meeting of Popular Movements, Pope Francis set forth a tripartite crtique of “our economy” maintaining:
that our economy kills.
that our economy excludes.
that our economy destroys Mother Earth
Alexis Tsipiras had already met Pope Francis in September 2014 in a meeting arranged by the former head of the Austrian Communist Party. The papal confidante, Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, applauded when the left radical, atheist philosopher Gianni Vattimo called for a new Papal International under the leadership of Pope Francis, which was to take the place of the former Communist International.
“Therefore, it cannot be excluded, that Varoufakis will also become a privileged guest at the Vatican, following in the footsteps of Jeffrey Sachs who was invited to inspire the Encyclical ‘Laudato si’ and Naomi Klein who was invited to comment on it”, said Magister.
Avvenire is owned by the Episcopal Conference whose secretary-general, Bishop Nunzio Galantino, is the paper s editor and also a close confidant of Pope Francis, who granted him this office. Through Galantino, the newspaper has a direct link to Pope Francis.
In accord with the “Varoufakis theme”, the Avvenire has lately joined the No Triv camp. On April 17th, Italy will hold a referendum in which voters will decide for or against an extension of the natural gas mining concessions in the Adriatic Sea. Even though the Episcopal Conference had asked the faithful to discuss the question with knowledge and restraint without giving a recommendation, since March 18th, the newspaper clearly started taking sides.
According to Avvenire, the decision is clear, which is why any further discussion is unnecessary. A No vote to the extension of further concessions is unquestionably the essential conclusion to be drawn from Pope Francis’s official publications Laudato si and Evangelli gaudium.
Quantitative Easing for the People
Technology unemployment and the superstition of salaried work
The post-modern explosion of racism that is spreading in Europe is one the effects of the neoliberal aggression on the labor market, and of the massive impoverishment that financial capitalism is bringing about everywhere.
The Economist (February 2016) worries for the central bankers inability to further support the economy, as they have run out of ammunition. Surprisingly enough, the suggestion emerging from the most orthodox neoliberal magazine, is to launch money from the helicopter. Quantitative easing for the people is the only way to come out from the prospect of deflation, after decades of forced austeritarian reduction of the demand.
So far that keynesian suggestion, however, is wishful thinking: the neoliberal predation accelerates as the abyss approaches.
“Workers must wait until they are 75 to retire” is the title of popular newspapers on March 2nd. The chief of the Confederation of British Industry declares that the further postponement of retirement age “is necessary to keep the system sustainable and affordable.” Okay, we realise: workers must die before retiring, so the burden of paying for old people will be relieved.
Problem is that while governments are prolonging labor time, unemployment rises and precariousness rages among young people. Labor time and unemployment are obviously rising together, and technology is reducing the time needed for the production of goods.
Not only industrial jobs, but also cognitive jobs that used to be highly rewarded only ten or fifteen years ago are being replaced by automation.
‘We are creating a very small number of high-paying jobs in return for destroying a very large number of fairly high-paying jobs.’ (Nathaniel Popper: The Robots Are Coming for Wall Street, The New York Times, February 25 2016).
A startup incubator named Y Combinator has recently published a text titled
Why a bunch of Silicon Valley investors are suddenly interested in universal basic income
The text emphasises the necessity of launching a program of basic income as a response to technological unemployment. In the future, the reasoning goes, work will be automated more and more. As a consequence skilled jobs will be less and less needed, so employment will generally collapse, leaving a small group of programmers and capitalists with all the coconuts and most people with nothing.
“YC’s president, Sam Altman, announced an experiment wherein Y Combinator will “give a basic income to a group of people in the US for a 5 year period. At some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of [a basic income] at a national scale, Altman writes.”
If you give people money in exchange of no work they will not sleep all the day long, they will rather emancipate their minds from the link between survival and work: therefore social energies will expand.
Salaried slavery might have been necessary in the age of industrial work based on repetition. But robots are taking the place of humans in that kind of boring and tiring jobs. Activities like food preparation, children education, culture, healing and self care cannot be entirely replaced by automata, and do not need the blackmail of salary. People do not need the mediation of money in order to cooperate and teach things each other, and care for the health of their friends, and invent new techniques and new aesthetic forms.
According to Altman the concept of usefulness will be totally reframed, when people will no more work under the blackmail of starvation. What will people do when they will be free from the salaried obligation?
“Do people sit around and play video games, or do they create new things? Are people happy and fulfilled? Do people, without the fear of not being able to eat, accomplish far more and benefit society far more? And do recipients, on the whole, create more economic value than they receive? “
These are harder questions to answer. If someone relies on their basic income to create a gorgeous sculpture, how do we measure if that “benefits society far more” than what they were doing before? What if the sculpture is super ugly but it brings the person who made it incredible amounts of joy? Figuring out reliable, non-bullshit metrics for the criteria Altman’s proposing is really tough.” (Y Combinator).
The idea that one must lend her time in exchange of survival is not based on a natural necessity. Within conditions of scarcity that are often artificially engendered, people are obliged to cede their time in exchange of the money that is necessary to buy basic survival. But today the scarcity regime is unnecessary, as technical evolution has enabled an expansion of productivity that results in abundant products that should be differently distributed.
Salary therefore is now a superstition that turns technical innovation into a tragedy for society: when reduced to a tool for competition and profit, knowledge becomes a cause of unemployment.
High technology companies – Google first – are massively investing in the field of research for replacement of workers with intelligent automata: in an interview published by Computer world in October 2014 Larry Page speculates that next steps in technology are hardly compatible with the work week of 40 hours. The liberation of time is at hand, but if we want to emancipate time we must emancipate the survival from the blackmail of salary: this is the goal of political inventions like basic income, that I prefer to name “existential revenue”.
Existential revenue should not be considered as a provisional support for marginal people. It should be conceived as a stimulus to be free, and therefore to offer the best of ourselves to the community.
While human labour is replaced by machines, we’ll be finally allowed to do what we really like. The emancipation of knowledge from the economic paradigm is the only key that may open the door out from the hell, however we seem unable to see this way out.
DiEM25 Takes on Europe's Failed Response to the Inflow of Migrants and Refugees
DiEM25 chooses Vienna as the hotspot where European democrats will meet to address:
- The EU’s shameful response to the refugee crisis
- How a humanitarian emergency became symptomatic of Europe’s loss of integrity
VIENNA, AUSTRIA, April 18, 2016– DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement, will hold its Second Assembly on Thursday, May 5th in Vienna. DiEM25’s first event in Austria will focus on one of the movement’s key battlegrounds for democratising the European Union: Overcoming the fear of migrants and refugees!
Entitled Europe’s Duty to the Refugees, Europe’s Duty to Itself, DiEM25’s assembly will be hosted at Vienna’s WERK X Theatre. The event stems from DiEM25 Manifesto’s pledge to forge an “Open Europe that is alive to ideas, people and inspiration from all over the world, recognising fences and borders as signs of weakness spreading insecurity in the name of security.” Organised as a series of round table discussions on subjects such as xenophobia and right-wing extremism, capitalism and migration, and solidarity and open borders, the assembly aims to ignite the pan-European conversation that will produce a white paper on refugees, migration and solidarity with ‘others.’ Speakers include, Yanis Varoufakis, Srecko Horvat, Saskia Sassen, Sandro Mezzadra, Fanny Müller-Uri, Erich Fenninger, Teresa Forcades, Walter Baier and Katja Kipping among others.
“The refugee crisis is a manifestation of the disintegration of the European Union,” underlined Varoufakis, as he warned against the dangerous revival of “early twentieth century’s European black plague of misanthropy, xenophobia, and poisonous nationalisms.”
Asked about the Austrian government’s stepping up border controls and erecting a fence on its Italian border, Varoufakis said, “Winning votes by erecting fences and violating international law on refugees is the last resort of politicians ready to sacrifice their nation’s integrity for their own miserable petty reasons.”
DiEM25’s Vienna assembly follows up on the proceedings from its assembly in Italy last March, where the movement launched its “Transparency in Europe Now!” campaign. Founded in Berlin on 9th February, DiEM25 is rapidly becoming the most influential pan-European initiative to gather a broad coalition of political agents, social movements and European democrats in the struggle to democratise the EU as an antidote to its disintegration.
A 10 Euro entrance fee will be charged, of which half will be donated to refugee support organizations in Austria and the other half will be destined to partially cover the event’s costs. The assembly (19:00 – 22:00) will be livestreamed in English.
As night falls over Paris, #NuitDebout and DiEM25 join forces to rage against the dying of the light
Greece’s former Minister of Finance and DiEM25 founder is scheduled to address the movement this evening at Place de la République
PARIS, FRANCE, April 16, 2016– Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former Minister of Finance and co-founder of DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement, will join the public discussions of the Nuit Debout movement initiated across France. Varoufakis is expected to express his solidarity with the activists who have been holding night sit-ins and debates at the French capital’s Place de la République tonight at 20:00.
“What is happening in France, the gathering of activists, social movements, students, and exasperated citizens peacefully taking the debate on their future to the streets, is a sign that democracy in Europe remains in rude health”, said Varoufakis. “This is not just about protesting a particular legal bill or government policy, but much like it happened with the “indignados” movement in Spain, this is about people raising their voices against Europe’s slide into an economic and social malaise – against the dying of the light” the former minister explained. “As democrats fighting for a new Europe that the demos back into democracy, we must all join in and be energized by what is happening here. We need to listen and pay attention. To ignore or dismantle these peaceful forms of democratic expression would be another strike against all that is right and decent in Europe. This is why I shall be attending tonight”, he affirmed.
While the Nuit Debout movement was sparked last March 31st by labor reforms due to be passed by the country´s National Assembly next month, activists nationwide have transformed streets and squares into public forums to debate a myriad of concerns beyond labor laws such as democracy, social rights, education and the environment.
Cristina Soler-Savini is one of some one-hundred DiEM25 members present at Place de la République: “We obviously have a problem of political representation. This is why we are all here.” In her view, “as we look into the current state of affairs, not only in France, but all over the European Union, there clearly is a disconnect; a fracture that has gained visibility in France not only by the rise of the extreme right and social discontent, but one that runs deep all the way to Idomeni (the refugee camp on Greece’s border with the Republic of Macedonia). We joined DiEM25 because we believe in transparency and democracy as the basis to end this fracture.”
DiEM25 was launched last February 9th in Berlin. Since then, the pan-European movement has been joined by tens of thousands across the EU. Last March, at its first assembly held in Rome, DiEM25 launched its “Transparency in Europe Now!” campaign. On May 5th, the movement will hold its second assembly in Vienna entitled, “Europe’s Duty to the Refugees, Europe’s Duty to Itself.”
Caroline Lucas on DiEM25
When I joined hundreds of people from across Europe at the launch of DiEM just a few weeks ago I was in desperate need of some inspiration. The Referendum debate here in Britain was stale before it even began, with both sides trading blow after blow on the same issues: immigration and the economy.
Of course the mainstream debate matters – but DiEM reminded me that an alternative vision is emerging across the continent – and that this movement is hugely helpful in the referendum debate in Britain.
Like many people in Britain I have my concerns about the EU. Much like our own Government in Westminster it could be far more democratic, accountable and transparent. That’s why DiEM’s manifesto is so important – because it gives us a pan-European framework for change that we can all focus on. The proposals are both practical and inspiring. Take the suggestion of livestreaming the EU council meetings. It’s easy to do, and cheap too. But this simple measure would hand the power of bearing witness to each and every one of us across an entire continent. It would chip away at the power of the politicians who are so used to operating behind closed doors.
The energy that this international project could create was evident in the room at the launch in Berlin, even after 4 hours of discussion at the final event people clearly wanted more. And I’ve taken the spirit of DiEM with me into television studios, the House of Commons and lecture halls as I make the case for Britain to remain in the EU and for a cross-border movement to make it better.
After years of austerity – and with a political class so clearly disconnected with the realities of what’s happening in Europe – this movement is desperately needed to re-imagine what the EU could look like. Crucially it will democratise the EU and put people from across the continent at the heart of decision making. I look forward to working with friends from across the continent in building this campaign, and bringing about the bold changes we so desperately need.
The Core
Strange things happen. While middle aged white people are voting for Donald Trump, young millennials, those who have been born in the age of the world wide web are voting for Bernie Sanders. How do you explain this? I don’t think that the vote for the old good self-described socialist Bern is based on a political strategy and I would even say that this is not essentially a political act. In my opinion this vote is essentially the symptom of an ethical refusal of war, racism and growing inequality. Ethical and aesthetic refusal. The kids are looking at their parents, at those fifty years old victims and accomplices of the neoliberal culture, they see them filled with aggressiveness and frustration, competitiveness and self-despise, and they think: I don’t want to be so depressing. So they turn to Bernie, the descendant of the happy Sixties, the much cursed decade of creative laziness, egalitarian sentiments and social solidarity. I don’t expect that Bernie Sanders will be the President of the US, (although I hope it) but I think that his ability to attract the digital generation is meaningful. The ethical and aesthetic shift is quickly eroding the foundations of the Neoliberal consensus, on the right and on the left.
Therefore we need to elaborate a project of resistance, of survival, and what is most important, a project of disentanglement of the force of invention.
Democracy In Europe Movement25 is the first attempt to build a political platform for the fresh energies that will be unleashed by the disintegration of the European Union. DIEM25 is the container of a trans-national consciousness beyond the current upsurge of nationalism.
If the Union disintegrates we must save the core of this project: the network of cognitive workers who do not identify anymore with nations. We must transform this network into an experiment in autonomy and self-valorisation of knowledge. The only way to save this core is to emancipate cognitive work in Europe from the paradigm of the market. We have to build the techno-political platform that enables cognitive workers to cooperate outside from the rules of the profit-oriented economy, for the dismantlement and the reprogramming of the technical systems and of the process of production, distribution and consumption.