Varoufakis Details Vision for Ending 'Global Empire of
Capital' to Avert Catastrophe
From Common
Dreams - Kenny Stancil - December 12, 2022
Humanity faces a grim fate because the global
ruling class refuses to depart from the capitalist status quo even as their
quest to maximize profits intensifies the climate crisis and the prospects of a
nuclear war. But with enough solidarity, progressives around the world can build
an egalitarian, democratic, peaceful, and sustainable society.
That's the message shared Monday by former Greek Finance
Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who outlined his vision for how the left can work
together to end the "global empire of capital" and forge a humane
future—part of a Progressive International-led effort to
chart a path toward a "New International Economic Order for the 21st
century."
Varoufakis began by noting that "we have never been
closer to a nuclear holocaust than today," as the doomsday clock that
scientists invented in the 1940s quickly approaches midnight. Meanwhile, there
is another clock "counting down to the moment humanity will have passed
the point of no return from climate catastrophe."
"What is the global ruling class doing to avert these
twin calamities?" asked Varoufakis. "Their best to push humanity over
both cliffs at once."
"They have started a new Cold War," said
Varoufakis. "They are pursuing white-hot endless wars around the
world—wars that help them sell more weapons than ever."
"They are drilling with renewed gusto for oil and gas,
while delivering speeches on environmental protection," he continued.
"They are turning the screws on workers everywhere, while waxing lyrical
about social responsibility."
"Enough of their hypocrisy, their war-mongering, their
financialization of lives, and the privatization of our commons,"
Varoufakis declared. "Progressives of the world refuse to take sides on
this new 'cold' hot war. We are instead building a new non-aligned movement to
fight for humanity's survival by working for peace, solidarity, and
cooperation," he added, referring to the assemblage of Third World nations
that refused in the wake of decolonization and throughout the Cold War to side
with either the United States or the Soviet Union.
According to Varoufakis, the "one thing" that
undercuts cooperation, solidarity, and peace is "the reign of capital over
labor and the debt bondage it inflicts upon the majority everywhere—in the
Global South, but also in the Global North."
As the 50th anniversary of the United Nations' 1974 adoption
of the original non-aligned movement's proposals for a New International
Economic Order (NIEO) nears, Varoufakis argued that to turn progressives'
yearning for a NIEO into reality, a revived non-aligned movement must
"direct large quantities of money into the things humanity craves, from
plentiful green energy to public health to public education and poverty
alleviation."
Just imagine, said Varoufakis, if existing international
financial institutions were restructured and invested "10% of global
income into the green transition, especially in the developing world."
"Unless we bring down the global empire of
increasingly concentrated capital, there is no chance we can end wars,
eradicate poverty, or avert climate disaster."
"Of course," he acknowledged, "this will
remain a dream unless our movement manages to dismantle the global empire of
capital."
To end "the tyranny of capital over people" and
reclaim "plundered commons on land, in the oceans, in the air, and soon in
outer space," Varoufakis called for two key reforms.
The first is to ensure that "corporations belong to the
people who work in them on the basis of one person, one share, one vote,"
said Varoufakis. The second is to deny "banks a monopoly over peoples'
transactions."
Once that happens, banks and profits will "wither as
society's main drivers," the political economist argued, "because the
banks will be defanged" and the distinction between profits and wages
erased. "The simultaneous euthanasia of the labor markets and the share
markets, along with the defanging of the banks, will automatically redistribute
wealth and as a magnificent byproduct, remove the main incentives for waging
war."
Moreover, "the end of capital's power over society will
allow communities collectively to decide health provision, education, [and]
investment in saving the environment from our virus-like growth," he
continued. "Genuine democracy will at last be possible, to be practiced in
the citizens' and the workers' assemblies—not behind the closed doors where
oligarchs and bureaucrats gather."
Varoufakis admitted that "the twin democratization of
capital and of money sounds like an impossible dream." However, he
countered, "not more impossible than the principle of one person, one
vote, or of the end of the divine right of kings once sounded."
"Unless we bring down the global empire of increasingly
concentrated capital, there is no chance we can end wars, eradicate poverty, or
avert climate disaster," said Varoufakis. "This twin democratization
is nothing short of a precondition for our species' survival."
The former Greek finance minister concluded by calling on
progressives everywhere "to unite in a common struggle not just for
humanity's survival but for a chance at giving every child that is born
tomorrow and in the future a chance at a successful life... on a livable
planet, where war has become extinct, along with poverty and fear."
Varoufakis' address is part of a campaign that Progressive
International launched last
Thursday at the People's Forum in New York City, where scholars and
policymakers from around the world met "to
present, deliberate, and develop proposals for a New International Economic
Order fit for the 21st century."
In a pair of videos shared Monday, Jayati Ghosh, a professor
of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of the thinkers
who participated in last week's discussion, stressed the
need to ditch neoliberal policies, to "claw back some of the rights that
we have lost over the past 50 years, and to reinvent what we see as a just,
equitable, sustainable, viable international economy."
To start with, policymakers must "undo the major
privatizations" of the past half-century, said Ghosh. Alluding to the
ongoing refusal of
wealthy countries and pharmaceutical corporations to share know-how and
transfer technology that would enable the expanded production of Covid-19
vaccines, tests, and treatments, she also called for action
to address "the concentration of knowledge, which has become something
that is actually obscene and actively killing people."
As part of its campaign to win a fresh U.N. declaration on a
NIEO by 2024, Progressive International has also launched The
Internationalist, a subscription-based newsletter featuring
exclusive interviews; accounts of struggle from trade union, social movement,
and political leaders; academic research; translations; art; and more.
The latest edition includes an interview with Andrés Arauz,
an economist and former minister of knowledge and human talent under
ex-Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. The conversation with Arauz, who narrowly
lost the 2021 presidential election in Ecuador and was part of
last week's panel convened by Progressive International, focuses on
the "political economy of under-development in the Global South."
During last week's event, Yusnier Romero Puentes, deputy
permanent representative of Cuba to the U.N., announced that
the Cuban government had invited Progressive International to host a
NIEO-focused summit in Havana on January 25, 2023.
Progressive International general coordinator David
Adler told the
audience that "we are again in a moment of rapid geopolitical
transformation with the end of the unipolar domination of the United States—but
we lack a common vision of the multipolar world that is now in formation."
"Next month in Havana, we will bring together
governments, political representatives, popular movements, scholars, and
policymakers to start the process of constructing that common vision and
building the power to bring it about," he added.
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