DiEM25 says no to demonstrations of hate
A demonstration against refugees and migrants took place on Sunday, January 19, at Athens’ Syntagma Square, organised by various far-right organisations. A relatively small but vocal number of citizens was present, many holding banners with racist slogans and Greek flags, priests with icons who preached hate instead of love: a sad flash-back to images from last year’s demonstration against the agreement with North Macedonia. Golden Dawn members undergoing legal proceedings for their part in the assassination of rapper Pavlos Fyssas were also present, as was pseudo-neoliberal far-right advocate Thanos Tzimeros. All in all, a hateful crowd.
During the demonstration the German journalist Thomas Jacobi of Deutsche Welle and La Croix was repeatedly beaten on the face by Nazis who recognised him because of his role in the production of the documentary “Golden Dawn: A Personal Affair” (2016). That Jacobi was identified and targeted by the Golden Dawn is clear because this is the second time that he was bludgeoned by its supporters, the first being during last year’s demonstration against the agreement with North Macedonia.
The beating was not stopped by police forces, which, perhaps unsurprisingly, are far quicker to respond in Left-leaning demonstrations. The Conservative government took the opportunity to speak about “violence on both sides”, even though the Prime Minister has in past interviews assured us that “the far-right in Greece does not produce violence”. The Conservative ex-Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, in the meantime, gave a telling interview to the “Fileleutheros” publication, condemning foreigners, illegal migrants, refugees etc. Is it really any wonder we are where we are?
Our Greek Electoral Wing MeRA25 has condemned the demonstration, and all similar gatherings of racism and hate. DiEM25 joins them in this condemnation and stresses that we, as convinced European democrats, stand against all far-right iterations in Greece and across the continent, and in solidarity with refugees and migrants. We call on the Greek Government to stop fuelling and tolerating misanthropic rhetoric and actions, and to finally liberate all refugees and migrants from their inhumane imprisonment.
Why pensions are a European issue, and why the strike also is (and what you can do to help)
The role of political organisations certainly isn’t to substitute for the workers or their trade unions. However, they may at any time help envisage economic and social struggles in a broader way, in time or space, to open perspectives. The present movement over pensions in France deserves some thinking.
Europe
In 2003 a movement over pension schemes happened in France. Through resisting the massive strike, mainly supported by the Education sector, the Fillon government succeeded in pushing back the retirement age for all for the first time. In the same period of three months, similar movements happened in Austria and Italy. The three failed to defeat their respective bosses and political powers.
Austerity
The Yellow Vests movement, those of the students, of the teachers facing reforms such as the partial suppression of the Baccalauréat, of health workers facing the collapse of public hospitals, of mailmen, of firemen, as much as the wider movement against the counter-reform of pension schemes only appear as scattered because they’re not considered together in a political vision, yet rather evident. A convergence of struggles is said to be created, but all the critical situations in these various sectors, absolutely all are related to the reduction of public expenditure started decades ago by all successive centre-left or centre-right governments, in France or elsewhere. To lower the taxes on the wealthiest, reduce the cost of labour (as with the CICE scheme which gives back their contributions to shareholders), the French State as well as the others in Europe is leading an austerity policy. In some languages it’s simply called “shrinking the State”, through suppressing or privatising public services. All these struggles are in fact one single struggle against governments which are simply the proxies of the company shareholders; In France the president is even a banker. They want to raise their profit while paying less taxes and contributions to the States, which then shrink, accept to spend less and less when populations are still growing and inequality is rising. Less public spending on public services, on health systems, pension schemes, etc.
Unity
Divided within every State in various struggles which do not signal their common opponent, and between the various States when the austerity policy wished by all the shareholders of all the European Union is set to music by the European Commission and the Council of the European Union, which are just the union of all the governments, the workers and the populations of Europe have been going from defeat to smokescreen victory for decades. In the same way the unions couldn’t carry away the workers into the strike, other than the railway and tube ones, who performed a proxy strike for all others as they did in 1995, they can’t find a way to signal and confront their real enemy: the governments in the pay of the shareholders united in the European Commission. There has never been an anti-austerity transnational strike worth of its name. It might be about time asking why national struggles don’t pay, or not anymore. DiEM25 intends to take part in this fresh thinking, towards new forms of victorious action. Internationalism isn’t an extra or a whim, it might as well be the necessary condition to take back control of our destiny, in France and elsewhere.
Solidarity
For this reason, local DiEM25 collectives from several European countries have decided to show solidarity by organising events in their communities, and online campaigns calling for workers and citizens of Europe to support their French comrades, by donating to the strikers’ funds – managed by French trade unions.
And you can also show your support. There are dozens of strikers’ funds you can donate to – local, sector-specific, or national; here are some that have received the most media attention:
- Le pot commun– opened by CGT InfoCom’, the largest strikers’ fund (over 2.9 million euros)
- Le Stream Reconductible – French streamers and YouTubers opened a strikers’ fund, and broadcast shows (which you can watch!) about the social movement and the impact of the reform on all sectors of the economy (nearly 150.000 €)
- Solidaires strikers’ funds (national and local)
- Strikers’ funds in the Paris area (Démosphère)
Article by the French National Collective
Fundraising initiative launched by DiEM25 Dublin1 DSC
Our radical proposal to democratise technology
Each and every aspect of our daily lives, work and relationships are somehow influenced or mediated by technology. And its interrelation with other systems, and the power it exercises on processes and sectors, is undeniable. Therefore, its alignment with human rights and human dignity is indispensable for democracy.
Today Europe lacks a positive agenda to aim efforts, investment, institutions in that direction. Europe has been co-opted by the US and Chinese technology lobbies in Brussels and it’s letting its talent and the data of its citizens fly to its competitors. Even after the approval of the GDPR, a golden standard in privacy protection, Europe is still pursuing a digital transformation based on surveillance capitalism and data extractivism. A digital society for the few, of exclusion and exploitation, of maximum interactions, incompatible with its green ambitions and only benefiting one sector.
Europe can and must do better. Decisions about technology should not be irreversibly delegated to technocrats, corporations and tech monopolies. At DiEM25, we have been working to develop an alternative and are pleased to announced that our Tech Pillar has reached its voting phase. The Tech Pillar we present today proposes a Europe with democratised technologies and innovation, which puts citizens before companies, sustainability before narrow profit and responsibility before technological feasibility.
We imagine a Europe that preserves human dignity; the right to encryption, the right to computation, defined as the right of unconditional and unlimited access to public computing resources and infrastructure; the Right to an Algorithmic Opt-Out and much more. The new rights declared in the proposed paper must be followed by the creation of institutions to enforce them.
Because the policies of our Tech Pillar call both for new institutions and a participatory governance of technology. European citizens will have an opportunity not only to understand how technology works but also to participate in ways that shape it for the common good. Because democracy is what will save our future, not more technology.
The radical proposal we invite you to review and vote for today puts a stop to tech solutionism, but also to tech pessimism, depositing the future in the hands of European citizens, equipped with the tools to decide the technological future they want.
Let’s start by voting for it and adopting it. Let’s follow it with a campaign for the newly-elected European Parliament to implement it, to build a future which leaves the current model obsolete, not people.
Read the proposed tech pillar
The environmental crisis is global. The Green New Deal must also
In recent days, cities across the Balkans have been smothered in deadly smog. Residents have been unable to leave their homes and the government has issued official warnings.
Emergency measures were taken in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo over the weekend with the Serbian government calling an emergency meeting on Wednesday, as pollution levels peaked.
Solidarity with my friends in #Belgrade who are suffering the worst air pollution in this city. While the #EU is at least discussing a much needed Green New Deal, the periphery – other Balkan cities too (#Sarajevo, #Zagreb, etc) – is suffocating. Join the protests by @nedavimobgd pic.twitter.com/EZYJdDYNNm
— Srećko Horvat (@HorvatSrecko) January 16, 2020
According to a report by the UN Environment Programme last year, Sarajevo has one of the highest levels of air pollution in Europe. People in the Western Balkans lose on average up to 1.3 years of their lives because of air pollution.
The Croatian police on Wednesday also urged citizens living in the capital Zagreb to use public transport and avoid bicycles or scooters.
We believe that the European Union has a historical responsibility to support just transitions all around the continent — and beyond. As she announced her ‘green deal’, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said that “every continent has to find its own path” on climate. But no other country in the world can achieve a just transition on its own — even Europe suffers from a deeply unequal distribution of the burden of air pollution.
A Green New Deal for Europe must therefore also be a Green New Deal for Bosnia, a Green New Deal for Serbia and a Green New Deal for other countries whose citizens suffer from climate and environmental degradation.
This is why global climate justice is explicitly included in our programme as one of the 10 Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe.
Our 10 Pillars of the Green New Deal for Europe say:
The environmental crisis is global and the Green New Deal must be global.
Europe has a historic responsibility and must lead this global effort. For more than two centuries, European countries have favoured aggressive pollution and raw material extraction and have accepted the considerable damage done to other countries. The Green New Deal for Europe must make good this colonial legacy. It must re-distribute funds to rehabilitate over-exploited regions, protect against rising sea levels and guarantee a decent standard of living for all climate refugees. And it must ensure that green change in Europe does not export pollution to other countries in the world and does not continue to rely on resources from the global South. The supply chain for energy change in Europe must be committed to the principles of social and environmental justice. Although we are proud to provide aid to the Global South, European companies benefit far more from interest demands, resource theft and wage dumping. In order to bring about global green change, the Green New Deal must put an end to these exploitative economic practices and finally respect human rights everywhere – thus paving the way for environmental justice throughout the world.
What applies to the global south applies equally to our neighbours in the Balkans. There where we have been disposing of our old diesel vehicles for years and where we engage in wage dumping with our production-intensive industries and their polluting industries, and where our factories contribute massively to local environmental pollution.
We must not ignore Europe’s historic responsibility towards the global South and the countries of Eastern Europe.
Srećko Horvat, Croatian philosopher and founding member of DiEM25 says:
“For years the EU has been silent about air pollution that is suffocating the Balkans. While Germany is going through an “Energiewende”, countries in the Balkans such as Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatia are currently facing dangerous levels of air pollution, which is not only a result of incompetent governments but also of the great air divide between Western Europe and its periphery — namely the Balkans. These days, Balkan cities look rather like heavily-polluted cities in India or China. And, as people are turning to the streets, protesting against air pollution, both in Serbia and Bosnia, it is the EU that must put forward a much more transformative Green New Deal than the one proposed by Ursula von der Leyen. You can’t have “green transition” in only one country. The Balkans are a part of Europe too.”
Sweden: A clear counter-example for pensions
While the general rate of redistribution of wealth in Sweden is relatively high, this country has had a real push on the question of pension reform using a point system, as Henri Sterdyniak, from French Observatory of Economic Conditions (OFCE) indicates.
Indeed, years after this type of reform occurred, the situation there is quite catastrophic: retirees earn about 15 to 20% less than working people on average, while in France their incomes are about equal. Worse, the proportion of retirees living below the country’s poverty line is 16%, compared to 8% in France. The fear that a point system will impoverish retirees seems fairly well-founded when we look at what this means in a country that is “richer” and supposedly more redistributive than France.
14%: Again the logic of “criteria”
It is clear, as the analysis done by France Info shows, that Delevoye applies an accounting logic of blocking or even reducing of spending on the issue of pensions by saying that it would be good to limit it to 14% of the country’s GDP. His argument being that the GDP would be constantly increasing, which is visibly questionable, and this would amount to indexing pensions to growth, including negatively in the event of a recession!
The other option of indexing pensions to wages is hardly more reassuring, since they have increased in the last twenty years only slightly more than inflation and assuming the same ongoing increases is just superstition, with the Italian debt crisis as an example. This project is in accordance with the recommendations of the European Commission and the Council of the European Union which recommend for France retirement expenses which “should represent 13.8% in 2022, before evolving in a range between 11.8% and 13.8% by 2070, depending on the growth rate used for the development of GDP and employment over time ”. Again, it is the desire to reduce public spending, here by transferring it onto individuals and therefore as unequal as possible, through financial products that bring money to banks and insurance companies, which is in fact the secret behind the mask of the European Union’s plans. French and European bankers and insurers have obtained that from the EU so it matches their desire for profits.
Europe is not the cause, it is the political place where the decisions that concern us are validated, and it is precisely by fighting together at this level that the workers and the populations of the continent can break the logic of austerity. The struggle at a national level can payoff over time as shown by the temporary victory of the workers of Belgium in 2018, who knew how to take advantage of the electoral calendar to keep pressure on the governing parties, but only an international struggle can change for good the course of things, by profoundly changing the political and budgetary recommendations of the Union itself. Austerity, on the issue of pensions as on poverty, health or the privatization of public services and social protection, is a European problem in the sense that it is in Brussels that the alliance of the rich and their states against the people.
- Germinal Pinalie (National Collective DiEM25 France)
The European Union must stop mimicking Trump on Iran
In the spirit of what the EU calls “de-escalation’’ German government spokeswoman Ulrike Demmer recently asserted an official belief that Iranian general Qassem Soleimani masterminded the 2019 Yemeni attacks on Saudi Aramco oil fields in Abqaiq —necessitating US retaliation.
Demmer denied the Yemeni origin of the guerrilla response to a genocide in Yemen that Europe and the US did nothing to stop, and used the term “self-defence” for the New Year’s Trump-Pompeo assassination of Iraqi military officers – on Iraqi soil – to kill an Iranian target.
The EU has once again distanced itself from duties that come with being co-signatories of the Obama-era Iranian nuclear deal after the EU yielded to American pressure to reinstate sanctions.
Statements like those by Demmer and the meteorically risen Ursula von der Leyen, do not only destroy the trust of Tehran in relation to the treaty: these utterances show anachronistic eagerness, unmatched by US politicians, to participate in the Trump era and to make “Trump gestures” despite how the initial years of Trump’s reign met with fervent criticism and discontent from the same EU figureheads and opinion-makers.
Such increasingly convoluted stances on the key deal they signed, justified in a language of moral relativism, political correctness (Heiko Maas’s “sanctions against Iraq are unhelpful“) and amnesia, may be the air Brussels breathes and commonplace in diplomat schools, yet remain culturally foreign to the Iranian understanding.
The recent massacre utilised drone technology first deployed experimentally in Iraq by George W Bush, and developed by Barack Obama.
Trump and Pompeo’s decision– spiteful of US Congress and Constitutional law– was followed by threats to target Iranian cultural sites like Persepolis, against the Geneva convention. Riveting much of the world, the killings have thus far generated only convoluted and lackadaisical responses from European policy spokespersons and the expert community.
In her statement, not only did Demmer sound like a US Republican by conflating the interests and identity of Washington DC with Riyadh: she also conflates Iran with the Yemeni Houthi uprising against the Saudi invasion.
Expressions of solidarity by EU pundits sound more unequivocally supportive of Trump and Pompeo’s crime than the response within the US political establishment. Former president Jimmy Carter called Trump to warn against war, speaking to Trump in the sole language he understands—that of money and expenses. Though Democrats maintain an aggressive stance on Iran and the region, most expressed discontent with the spite for Congress and the Constitution.
Rehearsed propagandistic statements require dismantling. In September 2019 Tehran denounced what it called “highly provocative, destructive” claims made by Britain, France and Germany. Did EU members seek to please Washington after Trump and Pompeo denied the Houthi rebels carried out the drone-attack as a response to the Saudi attempted genocide?
By claiming “no evidence” the attacks originated in Yemen, the Trump administration opts for Riyadh’s preferred conspiracy theory, inculpating Tehran.
Demmer either dismisses, or forgets the Saudi attempted genocide in Yemen when denying Yemeni guerrillas’ responsibility for the attack on the Abqaiq oil fields, and by instead identifying Soleimani’s Quds force as the true culprit. Trump dismissed his own Congress’ overture to block US support for Saudi massacres.
Yemen found other allies.
Though Iran supports Houthi Arabs in Yemen with weapons and tactical advice (as Iran does with Lebanon’s Hezbollah) to claim these two act singularly at the highest levels of coordination, is both reactionary and analytically erroneous. Such assumptions are not only convenient to a broad neoconservative agenda: these are the European sounds Trump wants to hear. (Do EU officials intend to coax Trump into again raising NATO spending?)
Demmer mentioned Iran’s capture of a vessel in the Gulf as yet another official talking point justifying the assassination.
The Iranian retaliatory seizure came after a similar pirate-move in 2019 by British Royal Marines who, upon US request, abducted the Iranian tanker “Arian Dharya 1” in the British overseas territory Gibraltar, claiming the tanker coursing towards Greece would facilitate petroleum to Syria, in violation of sanctions which Iran had obviously never agreed to.
Tehran, at war with the Gulf and frustrated by Europe’s adamant support for Washington sanctions despite their status as co-signatories on the Obama-era Iranian nuclear deal, captured a vessel transporting oil to the Emirates. For years, Tehran has asserted its suspicion that Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are the bastion of support of Isil /Da’esh as Soleimani drove campaigns against the mercenary “caliphate”.
Symmetrically opposite, we find Western claims making no distinction between Arabic-speaking Shiite tribes in Yemen and their Iranian ally, justifying a bizarre “eye for an eye” combat to avenge Saudi grievances against Iran.
By going along with the strange symbiotic relationship between the US Republican establishment and Riyadh (previously explored in books like House of Bush, House of Saud), Europe risks getting embroiled, blindly, in a millennium-old Sunni-Shia conflict which Europe is incapable of understanding and which has today infused itself into regional capitalist wars.
“We don’t lament Soleimani’s death” stated Boris Johnson, whose party’s licensed arms deals with Saudi Arabia made just under 4.8 billion pounds during the Yemen crisis – at which point UK judges, under activist pressure, deemed the transactions unlawful.
The recent attempted assassination of an Iranian liaison official in Yemen shows the establishment’s outright identification with the interests of Saudi Arabia, scorning the nearly-forgotten protests against Western involvement in the Saudi campaign of collective punishment of Yemen. In 2018, the Western-sponsored Gulf massacres drew the consternation of US congress and high-level European judicial activists. Iranian support in Yemen (as in Iraq) only became crucial in the face of Western impotence to defy the US and British neoconservative establishment and respond to atrocities.
The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) must stand against any European solidarity with the American massacres, and must stand with initiatives such as those by the Italian dockworkers who halted Saudi shipments of weapons to the war in Yemen, stating “They shall not pass”.
This article was originally published by Informed Comment.
Arturo Desimone is an Aruban-Argentinean writer and visual artist, currently based between Argentina and the Netherlands (www.arturoblogito.wordpress.com). He’s also member of DiEM25’s Thematic group on Peace and International Policy.
Photo (c) Alexey Vitvitsky
James Galbraith's memoir of lifelong struggles to make economics a force for good
Economics is sometimes portrayed as a contest between saltwater and freshwater, between the coastal pseudo-Keynesians and the Great Lakes neo-Walrasians, between the flaws-and-friction model-builders and the free-market hard-liners. As evolutionists know, both habitats are fairly sterile. Evolution occurs in the backwaters, in the mudflats, bogs, lagoons, cypress swamps and wetlands, in the shadows of perpetually endangered habitat. In this article I will sketch my personal journey through the backwaters. Intellectually they are my home, as they have been for every other recipient of the Veblen-Commons prize, with just one exception.
The exception was my father, who lived and worked on high ground, which he reached out of nowhere or more precisely Southern Ontario and Giannini Hall, by a unique combination of gifts including practical knowledge of price control and strategic bombing, the principled and imaginative use of state power under emergency conditions, and surpassing grace in command of the English language. But the high ground was barren ground. John Kenneth Galbraith’s influence spread around the world but it could not take root at home.
My father’s lasting gift to me has been a solid sense that an economist is either a practical player in policy battles or nothing at all. Economics is not a theology of the human condition. Nor is it a branch of pure logic, however much the attempt to make the notion into grist for undergraduates may warm academic seats. Catherine the Great had it right in 1765 when she chartered the Free Economic Society of Russia, suppressed in 1917, revived in 1982 and of which I’m the only known American member, and endowed it with the logo of a beehive and a one-word motto: “Useful.”
At Berkeley in 1969 one lecture, by Abba Lerner, did not deflect me from French literature and the anti-war movement. Then at Harvard I took my first economics course from Wassily Leontief, from whom I absorbed a fascination with hierarchical category schemes and matrix algebra, two misleading guides to the field, which spent thirty years in remission before breaking out to decorate a research agenda. I also became, uselessly, an expert on the production of ammunition for the Vietnam war.
In a year at Cambridge I saw Sraffa on his bicycle, absorbed enough capital theory to be inoculated against production functions, skirted the theatrics between Hahn and Robinson as much she inspired reverence and terror, drew close to Kaldor on the eve of his great last stand against Thatcher and monetarism, was amused by the geometric pyrotechnics of Richard Goodwin, entranced by the beautiful matching of Sraffa to Keynes in Pasinetti’s lectures, and admired Adrian Wood’s quasi-Galbraithian theories of profit and wages. Adrian, my tutor, to whom I owe a deep debt, also sensed the barrenness of high ground, and soon gave it up for the World Bank and China.
Henry Reuss extracted me to Washington in June 1975, just in time for two great events. One was the invention of the Conduct of Monetary Policy hearings, soon re-christened Humphrey-Hawkins, the first formal and regular congressional oversight of the Federal Reserve. They were my baby for five years, and they led to the “dual mandate” – full employment and price stability – the most Keynesian and most successful charter of any central bank. The other was the New York City financial crisis, the dawn of disaster capitalism, three weeks into my Hill career. I was thrown into it at 23 and never emerged, a life-long ambulance chaser of debt debacles.
Of my PhD years at Yale, 1976-1979, little comes to mind – routine drill on dying topics, logic-chopping whose flaws I already understood. Sid Winter generously lent his protection. With help from Lucy Ferguson, for a dozen years my wife, I explored numerical taxonomy and applied it to budget expenditure categories in a thesis only one person ever read: Paulo Du Pin Calmon, now of the University of Brasilia, who became my first PhD student and would help launch the inequality project. Otherwise I diverted myself, a week each month, by going back to Washington and the Banking Committee to skirmish with the resident monetarists and to harass the central bankers, from Arthur Burns to Paul Volcker, and eventually to Maryland for a year, marked most by a first major paper, a comparative institutionalist study of credit and industrial policies in France, West Germany, Great Britain and Sweden, published by the Joint Economic Committee in 1981.
Then the Revolution came. A dog’s breakfast of damaging dogmas – supply-side economics, monetarism, deregulation and privatisation, each among the rising academic doctrines of the previous
decade, softened in ultimate effect only by an aggressive tax-cut and military Keynesianism. The problem of the early Reagan revolutionaries was not that they were academically disreputable as many claimed, but that they actually weren’t. At the Joint Economic Committee we fought them all, cooks and bakers in the front lines, backed by stalwarts like Bob Eisner, Walt Rostow – and also great luminaries, Tobin, Leontief and Klein, who appeared together in 1982. The New York Times ran their picture on the front page with a caption, but no story; I was shattered until my Republican colleagues emerged from their offices, one by one, to offer strictly professional congratulations. A policy triumph followed: the collapse of monetarism, and a political triumph, 26 House seats in the 1982 midterms, aided by ten percent unemployment. It was enough to stall the revolution, for a time.
Thereafter the economy recovered but the damage was done. The rise of finance and technology, disinflation, globalisation, debt peonage and the decline of industry, the rise of bicoastal inequalities, and the rusting away of the Midwest, giving rise first to Clinton and then to Trump – for all of these the course was set by Reagan and Volcker in the early 1980s. And the dogmas too morphed and lived on, shapeshifting zombies reinvented as exportable commodities in the form of the Washington Consensus, inflation targeting and neoliberalism, each eventually squeezed dry of doctrine until only the policy shells remain – tax cuts, central bank independence, fire-sale privatisations, deficit – and debt-aversion, all too useful to require the foundation of thought.
I came to Texas as the Old Institutionalists – Ayres, Gordon, Marshall – were fading out. Yet their ethos lingered even if few could detect it. For me the path forward lay in merging Institutionalist mesoeconomics with Keynes’s monetary-production economic space-time, modelled on Einstein – a thought planted by Skidelsky at Rostow’s poolside – and the lot with Leontief’s matrix-sensibility, eigenvectors and eigenvalues complete, to complement neoclassically-inflected econometrics with a non-parametric paradigm revealing the half-hidden structures in economic data. Peter Albin caught the gist and urged me forward. All this was far beyond my abilities but somehow just the right group of students coalesced at just the right time – from China, Portugal, Korea, Mexico, and later on Spain, Belarus, India, Sudan, Colombia, Argentina, France, Poland, and Iran.
Two currents emerged from this work. One applied numerical taxonomy to time-series vectors, notably wage change, reconstructing industrial and national-income classification schemes to distil the underlying structural affinities revealed by co-evolution through time. Steven Weinberg told me this was “cladistics.” We combined it with the extraction of discriminant functions – eigenvectors and eigenvalues complete (!) – which isolate and rank the dominant forces of economic change in each place and time. A referee reported that “economists do not use these techniques.” Seismologists, I later learned, had worked them out to distinguish earthquakes from nuclear explosions.
The second current was the measurement of economic inequalities from administrative statistics – payroll and employment records, mostly – using a generalised entropy measure, the between-groups component of Theil’s T statistic. The advantages of this Institutionalist approach are depth, range and precision, with results that largely mirror the best household surveys but with dense and consistent matrices of measures, suitable for panel analyses using standard techniques, from which time-and space patterns emerge with great clarity, showing on a global scale how debt and exchange-rate crises and regime changes drive inequality up, and how better export prices, lower interest rates and sustained social-democratic growth can bring it down. After an early presentation to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia John Archibald Wheeler came up to encourage me; my circle back toward economic space-time was complete.
Our approach to inequality has proved impossible to ignore entirely – it’s easy, cheap, accurate and replicable. It can be applied to many problems; most recently Jaehee Choi and I have shown how US states with the greatest increases in inequalities drift toward Democrats in presidential elections. But the larger point is the relocation of distributive analysis from labour markets and micro theory to macroeconomics on a global, interdependent scale, driven by structures of financial hegemony and power. Once again extracting information from matrices, this empirical and descriptive work yields a merger in practice of Keynes, Minsky, Galbraith père and Pasinetti, with distributive dynamics and a potential to unify economic analysis under an Institutionalist, Post Keynesian, Structuralist, MMT common front, buttressed by evidence and an expansive research agenda. Charles Saunders Peirce on Kepler comes to mind, that his gift to astronomy lay in impressing on men’s minds that the thing to do was to sit down to the figures and work out what the places of Mars actually were. Once again, the mainstream turns a deaf ear, to this day the macroeconomics of inequality – let alone the global macroeconomics of anything – does not exist in the JEL classification codes.
A further and ongoing evolutionary development is an elaboration, with Jing Chen, of the biophysical principles that must underpin a unified, reconstructed economics as they do every living and
mechanical system. Only through this lens can economics understand scale, duration, resource costs, climate change and above all the essential role of regulation, without which mammals die, machines break, companies fail and banks and financial systems melt down. Our metaphors are already biophysical, somehow our thought and teaching and research should begin to catch up.
Still and finally, at least for now, an economist must be useful. For an academic like a politician this means taking your chances as they come along. In 1989 I helped to trigger debt default and the Brady Plan in Brazil, making of Luiz Carlos Bresser Pereira a lifelong friend. From 1993 to 1997 I was of some use as Chief Technical Adviser for Macroeconomic Reform and Strengthening Institutions to the State Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China, my advice was largely to steer clear of Western economists and above all, not to open the capital account. Those results speak for themselves. Economists for Peace and Security kept me busy for twenty years. In 2015 I joined Yanis Varoufakis in Greece’s struggles against debt peonage and neoliberal austerity; we continue to work together on Democracy in Europe, the Green New Deal and the Progressive International. In 2017 I lectured in St Petersburg on the pragmatic economics of John Kenneth Galbraith, on the centennial of the storming of the Winter Palace and the 50th anniversary of The New Industrial State.
And when Bernie Sanders who does not need my advice becomes President next year, I’ll throw in with him for what it may be worth. I have hopes for a better world, free of imperial delusions, maximally demilitarised, authentically democratic, not too unequal, working together on common problems, saving the planet for a while longer. Well, anyway, one can dream.
Thank you very much.
Remarks by James Galbraith n receiving the Veblen-Commons Award of the Association for Evolutionary Economics. More information.
Reflections on 2019 — Yanis Varoufakis
Every year for nearly 70 years, The Guardian has collected the best of its journalism into a book – the Bedside Guardian.
This year, Bedside Guardian 2019 is edited by Aditya Chakrabortty with Paul Johnson, deputy editor, alongside Jonathan Freedland, Zoe Williams Emma Graham-Harrison. The editors were kind enough to ask me to write the Foreword, an apt send-off for 2019 – a year that will be remembered but not for all the right reasons…
Foreword
The government has failed – it’s time to go back to the people.’ The rousing title of the Guardian’s editorial at the beginning of the year was aimed, of course, at Theresa May’s dog’s Brexit. Alas, its wording carried a universal truth, suiting, as it does, the current situation not only in Britain but also the United States and the European Union, not to mention Brazil, Argentina, India etc. etc.
If one conclusion emerges from revisiting the past twelve months, it is that governments have failed almost everywhere. As a result, there is an urgent need to go back to the people if we’re to stand any chance of finding answers to our existentialist crises – be they climate catastrophe, social misery, geopolitical threats to peace, involuntary migration, or other assorted forms of depravity.
The past twelve months were not the worst of times. And they certainly were not the best of times. Rather, the past year has proved depressingly predictable to anyone who has observed, since 2008, our steady global slide into a postmodern 1930s. The failure of our governments, as highlighted by the Guardian’s editorial, felt almost inevitable. With its roots in France’s National Front, Italy’s Lega, Hungary’s and Poland’s governments, a paradoxical Nationalist International emerged on the strength of Brexit and Trump. The rise of Vox, Spain’s neofascists, proved that recalcitrant nativism is not confined to Europe’s northeast. Bolsonaro’s triumph in Brazil and Modi’s domination in India show that the North Atlantic is a part of a larger disaster, rather than a special case.
Stiffen your upper lip, you are not alone – a message to British friends
When I speak to my despairing British friends, I feel a need to lift their spirits. Not out of solidarity, but because they have no reason, I believe, to feel more downhearted than the rest of us. While their anguish is understandable, I tell them they have good cause to stiffen their upper lip and, despite Boris, Nigel, Labour’s divisions and the overall sorry state of the House of Commons, to remain relatively upbeat about British democracy. I remind them that one of nationalism’s hidden symptoms [SL1] is a creeping feeling of inverse exceptionalism – a false sense that our country, our democracy, our parliament is in a worse state than our neighbours’.
Inverse exceptionalism is a great gift to xenophobic populists as they can weaponise it with the promise to make our democracy great again, to make us proud again. Thus, my unexpected message to British friends: you are not in greater trouble than we are. We all live downstream. The toxic algae engulfing you in Brexit’s wake is a general condition that we all suffer from. If anything, having immersed yourselves in it since June 2016, your democracy is perhaps better suited now to be tough not just on Brexit but also on the causes of Brexit, which can be pinpointed both within and without the British Isles. In short, stop feeling sorry for yourselves, desist self-absorption, and let’s join forces to help the people take back control. In Britain. In Europe. Everywhere.
I know that, during the past twelve months, it was hard to resist the spectre of national humiliation. Theresa May’s strategic error of agreeing to Brussels’ two-phase negotiation (first, London gives the EU everything and only then will the EU discuss London’s demands), coupled with red lines that boxed her into an impossibility, guaranteed the former Prime Minister’s abject defeat. However, the UK media did you a disservice by setting the British Prime Minister’s foolishness, and the House of Commons’ divisions, against a fictional EU that is rules-based, democratic, united and, above all else, competent – a European Union, in other words, that could not be further from reality.
Back in 2015, three days into my tenure as finance minister, the President of the Eurogroup, comprising the finance ministers of EU countries sharing the euro, threatened me with Grexit if I dared insist on challenging the self-defeating, inhuman austerity programme our people had just rejected in a democratic election. Shortly afterwards, at my first Eurogroup meeting, Wolfgang Schäuble, my German counterpart, declared that elections cannot be allowed to change previously agreed economic policies, to which I responded that his words were music to the ears of Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks who think along similar lines.
In short, the enemies of democracy and common decency are in power on both sides of the British Channel. So, my message to British friends is: stop wallowing in self-pity and, instead, join us in a common, transnational movement to build a democratic Europe.
A universal condition
Our condition, we must realise, is truly universal. Yes, as Patrick Kielty says in his article on p.000, an EU official said the UK needed to be taken care of ‘like a patient’. But so too should almost every country I know of, including those firmly within the EU. With the possible exception of China, the planet’s major economic zones seem to be governed either by regimes trying their best to resemble the Weimar Republic’s last days or by politicians, Donald Trump and Matteo Salvini for instance, who seem worryingly inspired by the organised misanthropy that followed Weimar’s collapse.
The aftermath of the European Parliament election of May 2019 was quite telling about this state of affairs. The day after the election, the European Union’s ‘liberal’ establishment were breathing a sigh of relief that the extreme right did not fully dominate the European Parliament. Readers of Europe’s mainstream press would be forgiving for missing what would have, a few years before, been declared a shameful result and, indeed, a global emergency: the extreme right had actually won the elections in France, in Italy and in the UK. Only sorrow should flow from our establishment’s readiness to celebrate the smallest of pickings, namely that the fascists did not win everywhere.
Meanwhile, as described in Ed Pilkington’s piece, every day on the other side of the Atlantic, Presidents Trump and Bolsonaro deploy a lethal blend of machismo, fear and loathing with a dexterity not seen since the early days of Mussolini. Worse still, their Nationalist International has a clear plan for the world, in sharp contrast to progressives who are more disorganised than ever: a transactional world comprising reactionary countries divided by lethal borders – as described in Patrick Timmons’s vivid article – but connected by bilateral deals that bypass all democratic mechanisms for limiting the power of multinationals with gigantic investments in fossil fuels, in wrecking national health systems, and with a transparent agenda to level all forms of worker solidarity in their path.
How did we end up like this?
Capitalism changed in the 1970s. The United States turned from a creditor nation to the largest consumer of other people’s net exports. Germany, Japan and, later, China grew on the back of America’s trade and budget deficits. In turn, German, Japanese and Chinese profits flowed back to Wall Street, in search of higher returns. This recycling system broke down because Wall Street and its UK sidekick, the City of London, took advantage of its central position to build colossal pyramids of private money on the back of the net profits flowing from the rest of the world into the United States.
This process of private money minting by Wall Street and the City of London banks, also known as financialisation, added much energy to this global recycling scheme. Under the cover of its very own ideology, neoliberalism, and with political support provided first by Maggie Thatcher and soon after by Ronald Reagan, financialised capitalism generated huge, ever-accelerating levels of demand within the United States, in Europe (whose banks soon jumped onto the private money-minting bandwagon) and Asia. Alas, once the bubbles burst, it also brought about its demise in the Fall of 2008 – our generation’s 1929.
The only significant difference between 1929 and 2008 was the speed and determination with which central banks came to the aid of the financiers. While the majority, in the UK, in the US, in Greece, in Germany too, were treated to the cruelty of austerity and associated ignominies such as universal credit and means-testing (as Francis Ryan describes on p.000), the central banks printed mountain ranges of public money to re-float the failed banks, especially in the UK and in the US. Expansionary monetary policy succeeded in creating a semblance of recovery while, underneath the surface, austerity was destroying our communities – Patrick Butler discusses this on p.000, as well as Helen Pidd and Jessica Murray on p.000.
The European troika, Greece’s Golden Dawn, Brexit, Trump, Salvini, Germany’s AfD, the shrill demands for electrified border fences and so much more were the fruits of this topsy-turvy policy of socialism for bankers and austerity for the many.
Going back to the people – everywhere!
The Guardian editorial was right: It is time to ‘go back to the people’. But Guardian readers who interpreted this as a simple call for a second referendum were wrong. Our democracies are too damaged for a quick fix. In Britain’s case, in particular, the demos cannot be put back into a broken democracy simply via a second vote. Something more is needed.
In the run-up to the June 2016 referendum, I addressed several anti-Brexit meetings. The one that sticks in my mind took place in Leeds, where I shared a platform with John McDonnell to campaign for the DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) line of ‘In the EU. Against this EU!’ Afterwards, a lovely old lady approached me to tell me why she could not agree: ‘My dear boy’ she said tenderly, ‘if I vote to remain, it won’t be you or Jeremy in 10 Downing Street to fight to transform this EU. It will be Cameron, who will treat the result as a vote of confidence in himself and a licence to hobnob with the Brussels people who crushed you and your democracy.’
Every time I encounter demands for a second referendum by people keen simply to annul the first, I think of that lovely old lady. However much I wish Brexit had lost, telling her to vote again, until she gets it right, is not something I would ever do. It would confirm in her mind that a vote is allowed to count only when it does not change anything. It will remind her of the power that she, her children, her neighbours and her community have been denied ever since trade unions and local authorities were neutered. So, if we are going to go ‘back to the people’ let’s do it properly.
Bankers and neoliberals never let a good crisis go to waste. Nor should we. The Brexit crisis is our opportunity to rethink democracy in the UK and to do whatever it takes to ‘go back to the people’. Similarly, across the EU, in the United States, in Africa, in Asia. Of course, this is easier said than done. ‘None of us are free’ if ‘one of us is chained’, as the old rhythm-and-blues song proclaimed. The British people will never be given full power to decide their future if the Germans, the Greeks, the Brazilians or the Nigerians are denied it. Anti-Semitism will never die if Islamophobia is not snuffed out too. As Edward Said once said, the Palestinians will never be liberated if the Americans and the Israelis are not emancipated also.
In the past twelve months, in the midst of all the soul-searching and despair caused by the Nationalist International’s triumphs, the idea of democracy proved its resilience. We saw the idea of Citizens’ Assemblies gaining ground, especially after its successful deployment in Ireland. We noticed that Aristotle’s definition of democracy (as a system in which the poor, being in the majority, govern) is making a comeback. We admired children across Europe who decided that it was time to act like adults because the ‘adults in the room’ were behaving like spoilt brats (see Jonathan Watts’ remarkable profile of Greta Thunberg on p.000). We saw young women win office in Trump’s America, ready to confront patriarchy, exploitation and climate change.
On a personal note, the past year has been a rough diamond. In the May European elections, DiEM25, our Democracy in Europe Movement, did something crazy: we ran in seven countries simultaneously. We wanted to demonstrate that transnational progressive politics is possible. I stood as a candidate in…Germany, while a German comrade stood in Greece. For our manifesto, the Green New Deal for Europe, we consulted thousands of Europeans over the course of three years. And our list of candidates in each country, from Portugal to Denmark and from France to Greece, was selected by an all-member vote, where the Germans also had a say on the candidates in Greece and vice versa. In the end, we attracted one and a half million votes but won no seats in Parliament. On election night, however, the Greek Prime Minister called a snap general election for six weeks later and MeRA25, our DiEM25 party in Greece, won nine seats.
Campaigning across Europe nearly broke me. But it also convinced me of the deep well of progressive energy waiting to be tapped in a Europe that to the naked eye looks beholden to the fake clash between an austerian establishment and the xenophobic ultra-right. Discovering some of the most progressive people I have ever known in the midst of conservative Bavaria, meeting poor brave pensioners putting up a fight against fracking in North Western Greece, supporting Sicilian comrades in their struggle to shield migrants from Salvini’s attacks – those were the precious moments that over the past twelve months helped me counter Bertrand Russell’s tendency to despair at ‘the unwillingness of the human race to acquiesce in its own survival’.
Bolivia's coup represents a threat to those fighting for democracy in the region
“The temporary death of democracy in Chile will be regrettable, but the blame lies clearly with Dr. Allende… Pinochet & his fellow officers are one’s pawns. Their coup was homegrown, and attempts to make out that the Americans were involved are absurd”
– The Economist, 9/15/73*
Together we can argue about referendums, (and hopefully surpass the precedent set by the British).
We can discuss longevity of heads of state; and whether a politician like Evo Morales in Bolivia, the late Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, or for that matter, German chancellor Angela Merkel— still manoeuvring Germany after abdicating the party leadership — should have had an extended career in office for more than a decade, based on electoral popularity alone.
But when military interventionism deposes the president elect of a nation, we forcefully decry the coup.
Bolivian armed forces, guided by their old contempt for democracy, have thwarted all constitutional mechanisms. Leading civilian opposition figureheads do not resemble the Indigenous Left which long criticised Evo. Opposition leader Fernando Camacho sooner resonates with the vehement Evangelical revival in the region’s politics.
With an equal belief in the Bible and the gun Camacho declared “Begone from Bolivia, Satan! Jesus governs now” Fellow exorcist, Senator-turned-President Jeanine Áñez promised to free the institutions of government from ”Satanic indigenous rituals”. Hastily, Germany announced it welcomes the improved democratic situation in the landlocked Andean country; Federica Mogherini stated the EU’s wishes for peace and quiet until new elections. Immediately, Washington recognised legitimate members of the same Church where Evangelicals Mike Pence and Jair Bolsonaro (baptised on River Jordan) worship.
Exiled in Mexico, Morales has meanwhile made headlines with gestures nearly as flashy: such as by driving a Bolivian-made ”Quantum” electric car around Mexico City. Before the coup, a more diverse opposition in Potosí targeted the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) government’s attempts at founding a joint-owned factory for producing lithium battery cells for export to Europe.
Ousting Morales resonates as a gunshot fired into the air by armed forces, deterring neighbouring countries against too much euphoria towards their Latin American “New Deal” hopes.
The coup represents a threatening example in the region. It comes as warning to the people of Argentina after they massively voted against the neoliberal IMF agenda of Mauricio Macri ; and to the Brazilians rejoicing Lula’s liberation from being a political prisoner.
The humiliation of Morales’ Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS) times with neighbouring Chilean youth’s eruption into burgeoning political consciousness, as demonstrations defied rubber bullets of the right-wing Neo-Pinochetist Piñera regime.
Leaked recordings reveal the voices of Bolivian opposition teams, endorsed by the military, boasting of their direct interrelationships with US Republican senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio: both descendants of Cuban exiles, representing the States of Texas and Florida respectively, they ardently support the Neo-Conservative agenda set by the US bipartisan elite. Senator Cruz campaigned for his party’s nomination by promising to ”bomb Iraq until it glows in the dark”. Marco Rubio makes his sentiments clear twitter-casting pictures of Muamar Ghaddafi’s executed head.
Senators Rubio and Cruz of the GOP mainstream may differ from Trump on one matter of realpolitik: slowly, they capitulate in their resistance to the future of Green Industry. Green Industry looms upon the capitalist horizon. Lithium will motorise the future’s highways. Has Bolivia’s hoarding the world’s largest lithium reserves (more reserves sprawl throughout Peru, Argentina and Chile) tempted the realists in the Neo-Conservative establishment?
Is the coup merely an attempt to prevent the exploitation of lithium at the service of Big Petroleum? Neo-Cons now struggling to control the Andean reserves may have accepted the Lithium-powered future of automotive industry, and are now applying old ways.
Rising social movements in Latin America form part of a nascent Progressive International. They represent “Neo-Keynesian” New Deal economic ideals of redistribution of wealth across national and class barriers. Andean countries like Bolivia, Peru and Argentina have the most lithium needed for Green Industry.
That makes our countries pivotal to the world’s future: either a borderless, internationalist Green New Deal uplifting and employing majorities; or a neo-colonial version of Green Industry, the farce we had hoped to avoid: plundering Bolivia for its lithium so that the foremost polluting countries can amend their participation in planetary heating at the expense of the inhabitants of the “Third World” today politely renamed ”Global South”. NO TO THE PROSPECT OF “GREEN” NEOCONSERVATISM!
Meanwhile, Morales’ old struggle against Bechtel‘s privatisation of Bolivian water 20 odd years earlier remains a prescient example for European countries like Serbia, where protestors today resist the privatisation of water.
*Quote from The Economist courtesy of the blog of American Journalist Jeffrey St Clair
Arturo Desimone is an Aruban-Argentinean writer and visual artist, currently based between Argentina and the Netherlands (www.arturoblogito.wordpress.com). He’s also member of the Thematic DSC Peace and International Policy 1.
Photo (c) Reuters