Capitalism As A Contradiction With Yanis Varoufakis
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- Опубліковано 4 кві 2022
- Yanis Varoufakis is a vocal critic of capitalism. He is a Greek academic, writer, and politician - as former Minister of Finance, led negotiations during the government debt crisis of 2015. But even as the founder of the left-wing political party MeRA25 (European Realistic Disobedience Front) in 2018, he laments the bankruptcy of today’s left.
He describes capitalism as a contradiction with immense advantages (innovation, wealth, gadgets, technologies) but also with an inherent tendency to cause aesthetic, moral, psychological, and financial poverty. Luigi Zingales and Bethany McLean sit down with Varoufakis to understand his diagnosis of the ills of capitalism, not as an unjust system but one that is inefficient and freedom impeding.
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The ending of this, lmao. It was like a couple of white-belt karate students invited a professional boxer to a friendly arm-wrestling match, lost unequivocally despite holding onto the table, posed for a group selfie, then waited until he was out of earshot to immediately start bragging "Ohhh he wasn't so tough, I could've taken him for sure. Did you see him flinch when I flexed?"
I’m not economically literate enough to argue against capitalism effectively, but as an American from the Appalachian region I know that having our commons stolen by the collusion of government and industry (coal and railroad companies), we are left at the mercy of ruthless exploiters of our bodies, time, skills, etc… . Humans rely on a relationship with land to enact true autonomy and self determination. We are not actually free in any sense when our access to land and mineral resources are denied to us under the guise of “private property” that is enforced by state monopolistic violence.
Additionally, markets cannot be “free” without a true commons that engenders creative innovation.
Also, there is oligopoly in private sector and only 10% union/collective agreement (versus Sweden/Denmark ~70%) there is no real accountability to the workers who actually produce this world, the market serves owner/shareholder class interest, not the lives of the majority of workers. Can we say our culture is authentic, that we live in an economic system informed by the people for the people, when the “leadership” of the owner class bars 90% of workers from questioning how things are run? Working class should have more stake in the enterprises they collectively build, more benefits accrued from the advances they make in productivity, not more precarity and austerity-the incentive structure for hard work has been rotting for half a century and the world has suffered immensely from it. Crying shame what’s become of America.. do real patriots believe in the abstraction of market indicators or in the lives of actual people who produce this market? WWJD.
Argued against capitalism effectively ✔ Hello from eastern Kentucky.
@@totonow6955 The simplest argument against capitalism that I’ve thought of so far is this:
In the USA in 2022, hardly any citizen living in the country could be considered a “capitalist” by definition, because overwhelmingly, we are LABOR, and the majority of us are exploited labor (by the numbers).
As of 2021, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 89% of all U.S. stocks, so even stock market participation isn’t enough to make most workers participants in capitalism.
If we are not capitalists, but merely exploited workers whose real wealth is decreasing steadily every year, capitalism is not offering us a good deal, and the deal gets worse every year, then why would we support it without at the very least demanding a shake up?
Worse, all three branches of government are now so captured by the capitalist class that even our votes don’t matter.
Under those conditions there are few rational moves left in the game, and none of them are pretty.
Major props to Yanis for using Linux as an example to refute antiquated arguments about capitalism's innovations.
Open source is the larger example of which linux is a subset. NASA and DARPA are other examples.
@@GhostOnTheHalfShell Open source might also be the answer to the "economies of scale" argument Varoufakis was not allowed to answer to.
The Mondragon corporation in the Basque region of Spain is the closest thing to what Yanis is talking about in reforming corporate property rights and is widely successful. It's a large corporation composed of many cooperatives across various industries (banking, retail, higher Ed, manufacturing) employing over 70k workers. While each of the cooperatives is owned by its workers and have been for over 50 years.
Coops are generally quite successful. Venezuela showed how not to do them though. The state imposed coops v the natural ones in the country had vastly different outcomes.
I wish you’d kept him on longer to ask these questions you discussed instead of taking apart his points or putative arguments without allowing him to redress them.
Capitalists never play fair
Imagine that the Booth School would genuinely question their neoliberal bias. Very difficult. It's defined their reputation.
@@LongDefiant Oh they play fair, but they hire the legislative branch to write the rules to play by. Greed is obviously the feature that took humanity to the apex of the food chain and the feature that will kill it too.
I expected them to do that, it’s how they roll because they are indoctrinated into the neoliberal mind trap.
I agree. Even if that's all the time they had, I don't see this post-interview critique often in interviews because it feels like very bad form.
Thank you for inviting him. Varoufakis has a great vision and dares to think outside of the box and confront and deconstruct realities and expose them as mere ideologies. The hosts could firther learn from him. I bet if he could have answered the critique the hosts gave after he left. Good discussion.
I agree, Frank Spijker, but I'm a bit more suspicious than you. Why would you want to continue a discussion, but without the guest? Do they fear the answers?
The comments at the end for example positing a "caste system" were disgraceful. The interviewers seemed to ignore all the points made by Varoufakis and then to read off their predetermined talking points shilling for capital.
Right?? I got there and was wondering what in the world they were talking about, lol. What do they mean, you'd be assigned a cooperative at birth? If the cooperatives are companies wouldn't you like... just get a job there?
Amen to that brothers and sisters! When the Female host jumped to caste system she lost all my respect. Go Varos! F--k Meta!
I forgot about that one. In fact, it is the ultimate way to discard his ideas as rubbish, when you know they are not and he would have easily debunked that argument. Anyone who has read "Another now" knows that you can change jobs just as easily, and even start your own company or become an independent worker. A system of Universal Basic Income/Dividend is attached to the new economic/political system.
In terms of the criticism of small coops. A) The economists "inefficiency" is the 99%s full employment. B) I'm an ex-corporate engineer, the individual departments of many large corps might as well be separate coops because they frequently don't work together well.
Why didn't you invite your guest to answer your challenges to his arguments instead of waiting until after he'd left the room?
Pretty poor sportsmanship I'd say. Even I could see giant holes in your post-interview arguments and I'm not an economist.
As Yanis touched upon, much past innovation was not the result of one or two individuals but heavily dependent on tax payers (government) input and built upon past scientific and technological advances that came out of state funded universities or from the work of people driven by curiosity or a desire to see human progress rather than line their own pockets.
Someone in the comments mentioned the Mondragon organisation. This is an example of diversity and economies of scale within a cooperative structure, similar to the way franchises work. There is still an operational management structure within the Mondragon companies and pay differentials. It's just that the strategic company decisions are made by the employees of the company, including how the proceeds of the company are invested or divided.
It seems that the hosts are looking for a perfect system to implement (which probably doesn't exist) before actually trying anything new to replace the failing neoliberal globalist system we now have. Basically a pointless academic exercise while we speed towards the cliff.
The covid vaccines is a bad example of their economies of scale argument. Yes vaccines were developed at short notice (with huge tax payer input) but company profits were placed above all else, to the extent that the use/development of potentially effective and cheap anti-viral drugs was suppressed due to the e effective capture of government by corporations and the assistance of corporately owned media. Yanis also pointed out the global distribution problem this also caused.
Extremely disappointed that Varoufakis left the conversation midway through. The point of having these discussions is to allow for the debate to keep going. These are extremely broad and divisive topics and you wouldn't really be expecting to be convinced just in 30 minutes of superficial exposition. I think one of the interesting aspects of Varoufakis' points is that they are usually very nuanced, and this format I'm afraid didn't allow for him to really expand on some of his thoughts more. The question "what's the alternative?" is extremely hard to answer otherwise, because it needs a lot of nuance.
Check out his party Diem25.
Yeah very unfortunate, they were probably worried he might be able to actually sink their ship..
"Left the conversation"? I do not think that is what happened. The interview was terminated at a pre-fixed moment, "o so sorry you have to go" and then continue the counter-arguments, without the host having the chance to react. That is no way to conduct an interview, is it?
Capitalism's bust cycle is not a flaw, it's a feature for the extraction of wealth from the working class to the executive class.
Nope. It's a flaw.
The oligarchs have just learned to exploit it.
@@davidklausen1316 feature for them then, I'd reckon.
@@TennesseeJed Sure, one mans bug is another mans feature.
My point was rather that there isn't some devious group of masterminds that deliberately designed a system to produce boom-bust cycles so that they could exploit those cycles to siphon wealth. They aren't clever enough to design something like that.They just learned to exploit something that would inevitably arise on its own.
Some form of capitalism will spontaneously arise anywhere where people have sufficient property rights and are free to trade. It will then grow big enough to have boom/bust cycles, no matter who sets the rules and what their motivations are.
@@davidklausen1316 Yes I agree, it is emergent inside a complex system and not a conspiracy, but old Karl warned the world a long time ago. I suppose other things will continue to emerge/evolve as the stresses shape it. I am doubtful for our species to ever deliberately shape our society because the same greed that took us to the top of the food chain will be the same drive that sends us to extinction. We need a new ethos/paradigm that will need to be cultivated, but I doubt we can even with our sapient name.
Varoufakis has dared to see things differently and speak truth to the power.
The Covid Vaccine discussion would have benefited from the story of the Oxford Astrozenica story, where the vaccine was developed by a small group at OU who dealt with tropical diseases and had a good technology they could rapidly focus on Covid 19. This work was originally mostly funded by grants, so much more part of 'the commons'. So in the paradigm Yanis was proclaiming it would not be unreasonable to expect that the vaccine would have been delivered in a timely fashion. Astrozenica had the knowhow to develop at scale, which is mostly part of proprietary knowledge that in his world would hVebeen more accessible.
The hosts completely misunderstand Varoufakis' ideas. And there is much academic literature on the economics of cooperatives that shows a lot of promise. He gave one example of a successful cooperative, but there are many thousands of examples. On the so-called 'economies of scale': Varoufakis addressed this when he hypothetically divided cooperative 'Tesla' into 'T1' and 'T2' producing two different types of products.
14:48 isn’t this rather hypothetical? Seems kind of closed minded/assumptive that workers would be unable to self-regulate their enterprises given time in todays more connected ESG/SRI/eco-minded supply chain obsessive world-are we doomed to dreamless nationalisms in the stress of the anthropocene or what?
Can we not break out of these-conflict of interest, billionaire/“philanthropist”-ruts of non-accountability/anti-democratic concentrations of power? Our history has thrown off oppressive systems before. Maybe we could do that again, but without the racism/ sexism/ colonialism/ gaslighting this time?
Agreed, I think it was telling that to make the point of people's incapacity for collective intelligence the hosts resorted to the imagery of dystopianism
Varoufakis was so great here. What an embarassing display by the hosts. If this is the best capitalism can do in terms of its intellectuals, no wonder it needs be horribly coercive in order to function.
Varoufakis is uniquely adept. He has taught all major economic schools. In contrast most standard economists only study orthodoxy. As Richard Wolff points out, academia punishes anything critical of capitalism, therefore most economists are completely unnarmed.
"Academia punishes anything critical of capitalism"
Meanwhile, in the real world, there's like three guys left in all of academia by now who holds opinions to the right of your average reddit user.
By "it needs be horribly coercive in order to function", you're referring to socialism and not capitalism right? Between the two, socialism is the only system which must be enforced by the guns of the state, while capitalism will spontaneously arise and function anywhere and everywhere where people are free to own property and trade between each other.
@@davidklausen1316 This is an incorrect and narrow understanding of the aegis of socialism. The USSR and China were/are state capitalist systems. They are also known as authoritarian socialist states. Here, for historical reasons, the revolutionary leaders first granted land rights to peasants, where some formed into coops, then stripped that away into collectives run by the state. In this latter configuration, the state simply replaced lords and industrialist, leaving workers in very much the same social power relation to their place of work.
This is contrasted with libertarian socialism, where the state only exists in narrow cases to ensure democratic and representative workplaces. In form, this is far closer to the principal of reformation liberty, equality, fraternity.
A coop is the simplest expression of this principle. An employee owned corp is another.
The assertion that socialism is only one particular thing based on the history of two significant civil wars is also the ideological effort of industrialists and wealth to demonize a criticism of capitalism.
In the case of capitalism its own excesses are no less than the hideous atrocities of itself as played out in WWI, WWII, wars since then. We can travel back in time to the Irish potato famine as all the atrocity there.
Lastly in social structure capitalism mirrors most closely its European antecedent, that of feudalism but with wholly novel incentives and methods and mechanisms to extract wealth from an powerless population.
There is no particular animosity of socialism to markets either. Markets themselves are simply a mechanism to trade goods, but its own characteristic is entirely dependent on the power relation between its participants.
Indeed, capitalism as we know it today can barely be recognized as a market based endeavor because the concentration of economic power into so few hands destroys competition and markets and operate far more like fiefdom.
@@GhostOnTheHalfShell Socialism is, has always been and will always be a system of forced redistribution of wealth which ultimately and absolutely requires the guns of the state for enforcement and intimidation because the participation of those whose wealth must first be confiscated is never voluntary.
"Libertarian socialism" is an oxymoron. Libertarianism focuses on the sovereignty and liberty of the individual, and a large libertarian society will always produce capitalism. It may produce tiny comunes that behave like marx original vision of what socialism would be, but that does not translate at all to a society which is larger than dunbars number. To think that a society of millions would ever voluntarily sustain "libertarian socialism" is pure delusion and fantasy. We're talking about a planet with 8 billion people, not a tribe of hippies in the woods. Socialism on a large scale always requires the threat of force. Always. Now I live in Norway. It's quite nice here. Our socialism is hooked directly into massive oil profits so it never seems to run out of money to steal, and therefore functions quite well and most people seem to like it a lot. And you almost never see a cop with a gun anywhere. I wouldn't call it "authoritarian", simply because the cage the state has built is so luxurious and full of goodies that nobody ever has any incentive to point out the fact that it's a cage. The redistribution of wealth is still enforced by the real and implicit threat of the use of guns against anyone who does not agree to have his "fair share" extracted from him.
If someone parts with their wealth voluntarily to share with others out of altruism, that is not socialism, the word for that is charity.
Western social democracies are not categorized as authoritarian compared to regimes like ussr and china, but our socialism is ultimately enforced by the guns of the state just the same.
Sure, they're not opposed to markets: They only require that the productive people make all the wealth somehow so that it can be redistributed, and if that requires markets so be it.
The ussr was not state capitalism. That is an absolutely laughable statement. The notion that capitalism caused WW1&2 is wilfully ignorant misrepresentation of history on par with the old idea that somehow everything bad and unfair that ever happened in history was caused by the jews. I have absolutely no idea what kind of definition you have of the word "capitalism", but it's very clear that it looks nothing like what the common definition of capitalism is and how economists use it. But seeing as you refer to Richard Wolff as if he should be taken seriously, I am not suprised. That man has about as much intellectual honesty about what capitalism is as the great communist leaders themselves. He is so consumed by his ideology that he might be an excellent candidate to help design another utopian experiment where a few more millions of people are starved to death, while the ideologs try to work out the kinks. Wolff looks at state abuse of power, the horrors of central banking, cronyism, corruption, the military industrial complex, the inevitable pareto distribution of wealth, social inequality, global geopolitics, resource scarcity and a whole bunch of other "bad things" in society and says that all of those things are somehow belonging to and an essential part of "Capitalism". It's a way of looking at the world that has no room for nuance, and a crutch for simple minds to make a complex world easier for them to understand. Everything is easy to understand when you have a single thing you can use as the explanation for everything. It's so predictable and boring to listen to people who think like this, no matter what their area of interst is, because once you figure out what they view as the one evil thing, the thing that stands in the way of the glorious solution they have in mind for how everything could become perfect, you can predict everything they're going to say about anything. Listening to Wolff is like scraping my brain with a cheese grater, it's so painful, because he doesn't have a single original thought, it's all just regurgitation of standard marxist tripe.
The population is "powerless"? What a joke.
Capitalism today is not "marked based"? My man, what are you smoking?
Criticism of capitalism is not demonized as part of some devious plot by the ruling class to keep their power. Criticism of capitalism is demonized by average people who have no connection to the ultra rich, because marxists have been going on about nothing for 150 years non-stop and every time someone is stupid enough to try to get rid of capitalism it results in biblical disasters and every thinking person on the planet with a shred of dignity finally realized at some point that somebody have to tell you retarded fucks that getting rid of the only system we know of that produces large scale increases in quality of living is just a sneaky way of genociding the fuck out of the working classes that you're supposedly so fond of.
Fuck, even Marx knew and said that you needed capitalism to do its thing first to generate all the wealth that was needed before you even had a chance for the "inevitable socialist revolution" to take place.
The bolsheviks didn't agree, they thought they could take a shortcut to paradise by just burning the system down and forcing everyone to repeat ideological slogans in the ashes of what was left. Maybe they could be forgiven for not realizing what the consequences would be, but you modern utopians don't have that privilege. We know what happens now, because it turns out that the only thing people who think everything bad can be left at the feet of capitalism are good at is destroying societies bit by bit until there is nothing left worth living in.
Now capitalism isn't perfect. Far from it. It's massively fucked up on a global scale, but at least it generates wealth, which is more than you can say about any alternative system that has to function on planet earth instead of rainbow-paradise dreamland where everyone can have everything they ever want and need and nothing unfair ever happens to anybody.
It's terribly unfair to continue the discussion without the invitee after he's gone. The points you were making in that last bit, should have been put to him to respond to.
I was initially excited to see Yanis engage with capitalist boosters, but then later flummoxed why the hosts withheld their secondary counter arguments to Yanis’s rebuttals, which seemed cheap and evasive. The hosts seemed to have waited until they kicked him out of the room to double-down on their claims without Yanis being able to fairly defend himself. The hosts seem to pretend they know more than they actually do about cooperatives, which is quite telling. That being said, I wish Yanis had discussed Mondragon instead of coop banks killed by Thatcher, the Godmother of our impending bio-collapse.
Talking about collective ownership and co-op enterprises, please Prof Varoufakis look up Huawei the Chinese tech giant. It is collectively owned by its employees and profits shared among the employees. It's also one of the most innovative businesses today in the world with number of patents ranked in the world's top 3 in the communication tech field.
Can't say China around westoids. They absolutey lose their shit when the truth pentrates their propagandized brains.
I was so intrigued listening to him, and after he left you immediately continued with perverse debatering of points that you took away, removed, from the conversation. Some comments show me there's nothing of value to be heard in those following 16 minutes.
didn’t cuba produced multiple quality vaccines?
32:40 Why are you talking about the points after your guest left? It was interesting challenges for them while they were on but the ending is pointless without perspective.
Luigi, perhaps you already know this, but banks create money out of thin air when they make loans (see work done by Steve Keen & Richard Werner).
With this fact in mind, you can answer the question: where will the money come from?
Credit creation by banks and dealer-banks fueled housing bubbles, stock bubbles in the past and continues to do so today. Credit creation, when directed roeards productive enterprises, leads to real GDP gains while credit creation for speculative purposes leads to booms and busts. This is the system we have today.
Credit creation can and should be directed towards cooperatives where the workers have skin-in-the-game (retirement & other benefits are tied to performance in the market) in the success of their enterprise.
The simplest argument against capitalism that I’ve thought of so far is this:
In the USA in 2022, hardly any citizen living in the country could be considered a “capitalist” by definition, because overwhelmingly, we are LABOR, and the majority of us are exploited labor (by the numbers).
As of 2021, the wealthiest 10% of Americans owned 89% of all U.S. stocks, so even stock market participation isn’t enough to make most workers participants in capitalism.
If we are not capitalists, but merely exploited workers whose real wealth is decreasing steadily every year, capitalism is not offering us a good deal, and the deal gets worse every year, then why would we support it without at the very least demanding a shake up?
Worse, all three branches of government are now so captured by the capitalist class that even our votes don’t matter.
Under those conditions there are few rational moves left in the game, and none of them are pretty.
"the deal gets worse every year" may be correct if you're only looking at the very last couple of years.
If you look from the start of the industrial revolution until about 2007 there's miraculous exponential growth in the average standard of living, both in the us and for every other country that has ever been free enough for capitalism to function. Read some Steven Pinker or something.
If you think that, after lifting humanity out of starving in the mud for 150 years straight, suddenly capitalism is the thing that doesn't work because some things started getting worse recently, you're just not looking very hard at alternative explanatory factors. Like globalization, the parasitic growth of the state, deficit spending and central bank money printing, the long term debt cycle approaching its final stage, demographic collapse in industrialized countries, corruption, hypermongoloid energy politics that are worsening the effects of peak cheap oil, harder comeptition over scarce global resources as more people can now afford to buy things they want, I could go on.
It's like if the world was a morbidly obese chain smoking sedentary alcoholic and capitalism is the heart desperately pumping to keep the flow of nutrients and waste going, and then when this person starts going into chronic heart failure because of course they were going to, somehow its all the hearts fault that they now feel like shit when their lungs and legs are filling up with fluid, and not a lifetime of bad habits.
Maybe Yanis forgot to clarify that the current way of financialized capitalism is obviously not working well, in terms of sustaining livable conditions for humanity, and standard well being.
Then the hosts may see why he seeks a drastically different form of economy.
Do you know who Jacque fresco was? The Venus Project? Technology used for the improvement of living standards,not profits! Answers all these questions!
Whether capitalism is just or not is a red herring. It flatly immoral. It offers precisely two options: be exploited, or be the exploiter; neither of which allow for any dignity (although the person who actually toils is, by default, inherently more dignified). It is also, if one merely thinks it through, ultimately untenable without a massive apparatus of coercion - which itself is ultimately untenable/unsustainable. Also, the one interviewer seems unaware that innovation - like that of the iPhone, Internet, all things IT in fact - comes from the state sector (namely the Pentagon in the cases mentioned); it is handed off to private business, who sell it back to the public who subsidized its creation (one example of socialism for the rich). The other interview seems unaware of Jonas Salk.
One solid, long term and large scale cooperative is the Mondragon Industries in the Basque area of Spain. Established in the 1950s.
Your concepts about cooperation and competition re: cooperatives and innovation is pretty naive and not up-to-date with research.
One thing that motivates people to innovate is being paid enough to not worry about money - more money does not increase innovation - but can increase repetitive work output.
Another motive is just having an interesting problem, the challenge of it. Yet another motivation is being a part of an important challenge. And, for many people being part of something bigger than themselves.
You actually talk about this later on. It seems a bit unfair to keep talking about his ideas after he has left the conversation.
The way Yanis explains how vaccines should be funded and produced pretty much mirrors how the U.S. and U.K. rearmed during W.W. 2., a major factor in the defeat of the Axis.
Some comments. Large corporations are given all kinds advantages through legislation, a democratic society could do the same for co-operatives. Legislation granted corporations the right to vote in the US which is much more extreme than what is being proposed by Mr. Varoufakis. I think we should find ways to make co-operatives more competitive which would allow them to be tested in the market without dismantling the current structures. This would be a middle ground between what we have now in the US and what Mr. Varoufakis suggests. One advantage of being in a co-operative would be the same as a corporate one, income. The possibility of receiving a portion of profits from your work is a great financial incentive which could compete with currents modes of wage earning. A core ideal of the West is to decentralize power as much as possible, we are doing the opposite by continuing to uphold this idea that corporations are "too big to fail" and that they should be awarded voting power. We should test this thesis by creating resources for starting and structuring co-operatives, the same way that we do for C-Corps, Non-Profits and others that are common. Again, a middle ground in order to test this thesis without overturning the larger structure. Onto some criticism of the hosts' comments and criticism of Varoufakis. This argument that by legislating co-operatives we would re-introduce the caste system is quite a leap. You argue that there wouldn't be enough space at a coveted co-op and hence that would lead to the state being required to assign the co-op that people would need to work in. This is again a large leap, possibly the most dystopian you could conjure up in order to refute his argument. Reordering the corporate structure to a co-operative one doesn't necessarily mean that all competition is removed from the larger system. Is it too far fetched to think that the co-operative can vote on new hires? Or that people can self assemble and seek out companies whose goals are aligned with their own? Or start their own co-operatives with like minded individuals with a variety of skills, talent and experience. You can see this kind of behavior happening in the Ethereum community every day. Theorists, for example Vitalik Buterin, write papers to describe noteworthy problems and others self assemble to tackle whatever problem they are drawn to. People don't need to be assigned a position by Vitalik in order to join into the work. If one problem is too crowded, the principle of market forces still remain. And now for some real data that we're seeing, that amazingly I haven't heard as an argument from Varoufakis yet. We're seeing the re-emergence of feudalism in the housing market in the US, not to mention this shadowy version that Yanis describes at a macro scale. Large corporations are buying up residential real estate which decreases the supply and raises the cost of ownership ever higher and ever out of reach for young adults. This phenomenon also increases rents to a value that is just barely sustainable by the market. After all, we're not going to expect people to live out of tents and RVs to cope with free market capitalism, that would be an absurd argument. This increase in the cost of living ultimately leads to a minority of land lords controlling rents which is followed by a decrease in free market capitalism in the housing market, a centralization of ownership, and market manipulation by a few. We know this type of distribution (Pareto and the bell curve) is common and expected in a variety of systems. However, as human beings who are fortunate to live on top of the ideals of a democratic society, we demand a right to affordable housing and a number of other human centric needs that are vital for democracy to continue to grow, morph and seek to become "a more perfect union".
Excellent analysis, thank you for your contribution!
The abject worship of might makes right and greed is good are strong in these two. Perhaps a vacation from the raving old boy network of wealth is in order. Or a short trip through history of the striking’s of empires and authoritarians to gain some perspective. They are simply spouting the lack of ingenuity and imagination that allows them to think humanity moves no where except for divinely destined kings. As such, they are clinging to the notions held by aristocracy so definitively ended in the French Revolution
32:30 “Disagreements with myself…” Yes, Yanis - that’s just your Hegelian dialectical mind. From those coincident opposites more values are realized than one static narrative could ever reveal - as in our current state of the political economy separating from its citizens.
That’s why I’m also a DiEM’er since 2020… 👍
I admire the hosts for having such an eloquent and knowledgeable "opponent" on their show but they were out of their depth to a laughable extent. They were brave in the same way that an antelope charging at a lion is brave!
How were they out of their depth?
@@davidklausen1316 If you're going to take up a position on a particular subject - in this case economics - and then publicly debate the issue with someone who is highly competent in that field you really need to be much better prepared in both the cogent arguments you offer in support of your view and rebuttals to the counter-arguments that your "opponent" throws at you. These hosts were nowhere near being up to the task. Although to be fair to them I think they are on the wrong side of the argument anyway, so it's always going to be more difficult for them than YV. Perhaps nobody could have done much better but that doesn't mean they did well.
@@markrollinson2257 I got the notion that this was more of an exploratory podcast converstaion, not a "debate" where yanis and the hosts were "opponents".
They gave some opposing thoughts afterwards, but the actual conversation itself doesn't seem adversarial at all.
If I had to pick a debate opponent for Yanis, I wouldn't bother with some random podcast hosts, but rather go with someone like Thomas Sowell, who even at the age of 92 is still sharp as a razor.
@@davidklausen1316 Okay, I accept that there might be some degree of playing Devils Advocate or investigative element to the role of the hosts but before the interview started one of the hosts stated "the intellectual opposition to Capitalism is pretty empty". I found that a bizarre thing to say and indicative of someone who hadn't researched the subject very well (hence my comment). No matter your viewpoint I think it's fair to say that opposition to Capitalism is long standing, often well articulated and it's easy to become familiar with the arguments of that economic position if you want to rebut them. I have to admit to a degree of bias in being a keen advocate of YV but, despite that, I don't think I'm being unfair by saying the host ended up being the one sounding both unprepared and intellectually empty.
@@markrollinson2257 I agree, saying there's little intellectual opposition just shows lack of reasearch on their part. And YV seems way more knowledgeable overall and far more eloquent. However, some of the countrerpoints they bring up after the conversation are pretty hard to refute.
Like the point about how coops are difficult to scale up and therefore struggle to compete against economy of scale (Particularily in highly competitve industry). I'm an industrial engineer and I can tell you from having spent 1000+ hours developing factory cost calculation models that it's pretty hard to manufacture something cost efficiently if you don't have a large enough organization to produce at scale.
If the last 40 years if not the entire arc of history doesn’t make clear that concentrated authority and wealth ruins nations like clockwork, then there is little to expect capitalism’s proponents. Arrogance is their chief weakness. Shock therapy was applied to Russia, Hungary, Poland and Iraq. The consequence was crushing economic decline far worse than the Great Depression, declines in life expectancy, fertility, a brain drain, grinding poverty and growth that has never recovered or has barely done so. This was generational decline.All have fallen under the spell of authoritarians. As a contrast, the Chinese were deliberate in the market liberalization and they succeeded in raising standards of living. So even though they are all ruled by authoritarians in the same way like a businesses rule worker lives. The Chinese are more competent authoritarians. For now.
The US and UK are subject to the same neoliberalism foisted on Russia etc and it is little surprise that a small cadre of billionaires in an old boy network has succeeded in staging a coup over the republic. As they gained power, the economy transformed into vast sector estates. They killed capitalism and we’re back to the same mess of feudalism: idle rich leeching the value created by serfs in fiefdoms of debt and interest
The chinese authoritarians have royally fucked up the chance history gave them. They are most certainly not the most competent authoritarians, they just get good PR from their western leftist cucks.
Deng Xiaoping did a good job of unfucking a lot of the mess that Mao left by letting market forces start to operate in the country, but he also created a series of timebombs, like the one child policy, that will now slowly ruin china over the course of a generation. The demographic collapse that is going to unfold there over the next 30 years is going to be an epic shitshow. The fucked up incentive structures china created to accelerate it's hybrid capitalist/communist system is ravaging the environment at a pace and scale that dwarfs anything we ever saw in the west when it industrialized. The rivers are drying up and the groundwater is so polluted most of it is classified as undrinkable. China relies on food imports to support its population and oil imports to run its economy, so it doesn't have food or energy security. China is no longer the cheap manufacturer, and is now starting to experience the same kind of outsourcing that the west has enjoyed for the last 40 years. The housing bubble there is the largest anything bubble in all of human history and it's now starting to collapse, because turns out, if you force a billion people to put all their pensions and savings into building ghost cities for 60 million people that don't exist, and never will exist because you genocided a whole generation of babies, you're going to crash and burn.
China had babies lying around in all the rural towns and villages, in the ditches along the roads and in the public squares and on the steps of buildings, being eaten ealive by birds and flies until they were dead and rotting, while people walked by. They had piles their landfills with plastic bags full of fetuses and murdered newborns.
Our authoritarians are much more refined than the chinese.
Brilliant talk
😊🏴☠️
Capitalism ceased to be an economic regime for the circulation of wealth and the production and distribution of goods. It is a secular religion. And like every religion it has become dogmatic, authoritarian and dominated by theologians who are capable of anything (including falsifying data to confirm theories) to enjoy the benefits of symbolic power and the profits that come from it. Anyone who meekly submits to this religion becomes sickly greedy, intolerant and empty, capable of reducing all human relationships (including family relationships) to economic exchanges. Varoufakis' critique of capitalism is pertinent, but it is limited to the economic aspect of it. This is important, but the capital has become a kind of Golden Fleece or Holy Grail (a sacred object with mystical power to heal all wounds and diseases in the world). This is totally ridiculous. Only the idiots and the malicious refuse to see that capitalism poisons humanity and the world in which it exists.
GREEKS-THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
💫
Capitalisnt
Democracy means the people have the power, that's not how it is now. let's make it so.
It's more than that, democracy is a process, not just a statement like "majority rules."
WOW, I managed to watch this for 6 minutes! I have been studying history, history of ideas, philosophy, science, mainly biology as almost everything has a biological dimension, different economic systems and recently I even managed to read the first few chapters of Marx's Capital and his manifesto of communism, for the last 25 years, this 6 minutes was enough to see why this fella doesn't understand economics, despite the fancy degrees from the lefty British colleges. Same cliche, same religious, fanatic mindset as of any marxist. But who was Marx? An angry, unemployed, failed father, with elementary knowledge of mathematics (multiplication table level, literally) who didn't understand the concept of value.
But the religious beliefs of guys like this don't worry me, what worries me is the mostly Marxists controlled EU parliament. The anti freedom of speech, communistic regulations and laws are drafted almost on the daily basis, thanks to clueless people like this former teacher. These marxists are exploiting the youth, the young and the intellectually vulnerable, they seem to get voted for without knowing their true plan of turning Europe into an autocracy.
[edited] I predicted that he was born into a marxist family, I was right. Most of these marxists are born marxists, just like children of parents from Abrahamic religions.
But.. lol, Yanis is actually crazy! Democratizing companies is the most inefficient idea I've ever heard. Every person has one vote?? Bonkers.
But Yanis we humans still wage wars among us ! You talk si-fi things , from very far away into future !
Maybe, no probably, those wars are by-products of that very unjust economic system. And hey, telephones without cords hanging from them were sci-fi some 40 years ago! Not so far in the past.
That voice is not yanis?
Why not?
If that’s a Greek accent, I’m intelligent?
Yani is taking nonsense about these vaccines.
Talking, you mean? What other argument do you have than "nonsense"?
It is better to have a flawed Capitalist system then to have a completely flawed Socialist or Communist system. Capitalism still produces hope and has the lowest poverty rates. Socialism has a high poverty rate. Decades of socialism in Greece has produced 30-40% of the people living in poverty.
brilliant #YanisVaroufakis 👌