Receding Democracy

Excerpt from the above video:

Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer? I believe so, but before we move on, what do we mean by democracy?

Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government.

Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded. What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of State.

Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn't last long. Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American Constitution.

Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for Masters.

And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere -- the Corporate world, if you want -- as a democracy-free zone.

Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power. Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? It's not because their DNA has degenerated. (Laughter) It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate.

Indeed, I spoke about my quarrel with Capitalism. If you think about it, it is a little bit like a population of predators, that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on, that in the end they starve.

Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis.

Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations.

So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the "demos" (people) out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks (national debt/ un-invested Corporate Capital) and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth.

Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants.

Now, this is not an original idea. The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago and it didn't go very well, did it? The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste.

But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism's doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including -- soon, I believe -- in places like China.

So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we'd better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary. (Laughter)

So the question is not whether Capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. The more interesting question is whether Capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society, where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora.

I think we can afford to be optimistic. But what would it take, what would it look like to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia?

In practical terms, allow me to share just briefly, a couple of examples. At the level of the enterprise, imagine a Capital Market, where you earn Capital as you work, and where your Capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company -- whichever one you happen to work at at that time -- is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment.

Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and savings, indeed, no towering twin peaks.

At the level of the global political economy, imagine for a moment that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, on behalf of all humanity.

And imagine further that all international trade is denominated in this currency -- let's call it "the Cosmos," in units of Cosmos -- with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of Cosmos units proportional to the country's trade deficit, or indeed to a country's trade surplus.

And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies, especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce. This is not a new idea. It's what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The problem is that back then, they didn't have the technology to implement it. Now we do, especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere.

The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between Capital and Labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy.

Will such a world dawn? Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia? The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively.

It is our choice, and we'd better make it democratically.

Thank you. (Applause)

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News Article:

If Yanis Varoufakis was going to make a comeback, it had to be in the German capital. Varoufakis, who resigned as Greece’s finance minister last summer rather than bend to Germany’s diktat of austerity, came to Berlin last week in a bid to steal back the limelight. Saving Greece was apparently not challenging enough. Now Varoufakis wants to stop his former nemesis – the European Union – from devouring itself.

In the half year that he led Greece in debt talks with its European creditors, the bullet-headed economist transfixed the continent with his unconventional style. Varoufakis shunned neckties and pounded the parquet of European ministries in his Doc Martens. Germans nicknamed him “the Greek Bruce Willis.” In his Twitter profile, Varoufakis describes himself more modestly as “economics professor, quietly writing obscure academic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe’s inane handling of an inevitable crisis.”

Last Tuesday night, Varoufakis hosted a show in a sold-out Berlin theater that was as much about him as it was about his new movement: DiEM25, or Democracy in Europe Movement 2025. The assembled ex-hippies and students were heeding Varoufakis’s call to “put back the demos in democracy.”

“Europe will democratize or it will disintegrate. That’s not a scare tactic but a fact,” Varoufakis said as he took the stage as MC and keynote speaker. The core of his thesis is that a cadre of bureaucrats has usurped the European Union, which is not only undemocratic but anti-democratic. The “depoliticization” and secrecy of decision-making have estranged the majority of Europeans from the European Union, leading to a rise in nationalism. Given the economic havoc wreaked on large parts of Europe through forced austerity, Varoufakis said, the continent is facing “a post-modern version of the 1930s,” the heyday of European fascism.

Despite his reputation, Varoufakis is not a firebrand and can hardly be called a politician. He delivered his speech in precise but colloquial English like the professor that he is. When Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called him into his government a year ago, Varoufakis was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin.

Not surprisingly then, the first DiEM25 event turned into part university lecture and part Communist Party congress – with little of the energy or participation one would expect at the founding of a grassroots democratic movement. A dozen speakers, mostly left-wing European politicians, followed Varoufakis to the podium.

The most rousing speech came from Miguel Urban, one of the founders of the insurgent left-wing Podemos party that entered the Spanish parliament in December. Urban’s voice rose in crescendos while his index finger jabbed the air. “You don’t need tanks for a coup d’état anymore, as we saw in Greece,” Urban said. “Debt is being used to blackmail southern Europeans.”

The audience reserved the greatest applause for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose stubbled face was beamed in live from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought refuge from a Swedish arrest warrant in 2012. While Assange claimed to have contributed to the DiEM manifesto, his exact connection to the movement was unclear. The Australian hacker repeatedly referred to Europe as “a country” and exhorted supporters to “seize the night.”

Two hours of fanciful left-wing terminology – “organic construction of daily struggles,” “regime of suppression,” “normalized precarity” – began to wear down even the most committed activists. Varoufakis paraphrased a saying by Oscar Wilde, joking that “socialism will never work because the meetings are too long.”

It would take another hour until the question-and-answer session – but not before Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek confused everyone by comparing DiEM to an “old-fashioned, paranoid science-fiction film.” One of the first questions from the audience was inevitably: “What is DiEM?”

Varoufakis’s vision is to begin with concrete demands, such as pushing EU institutions to become more transparent, then develop detailed policy proposals, eventually convening a “constitutional assembly” where citizens will determine how to democratize the European Union by 2025.

While its criticisms of the status quo are on the mark, Europe’s left has been incapable of presenting workable solutions. In a press conference on Tuesday morning, Varoufakis dropped a hint as to why. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the European left was drained of moral strength, or as Varoufakis put it, carried “collective guilt” for some of the worst crimes committed in the 20th century.

There are also other reasons. Since the times of Karl Marx, one of the paradoxes of leftism has been that it is an anti-elite ideology designed by elites. In his speech, Varoufakis said he was also addressing those people who were at home “watching reality TV shows to drown out their anxiety.” It’s not clear that he will ever reach them.

The live Internet transmission of the theater event seemed like a conceit. DiEM’s first demand is for secretive EU institutions to live-stream their sessions. But the movement’s own meetings Tuesday afternoon were closed to the public and the press.

[Reuters]

The New-New Left's Plan to Conquer Europe