Europe’s [Atlanticist] leaders are finished. What we are seeing in real time is their destruction and that’s why people are crying at the Munich security conference. A shake out of this magnitude usually happens only after a revolution or a war. This is bigger than any of us can yet understand. Philip Pilkington in dialogue with Novara Media. (Edited.)
… the expectation was of a Russia laid low by sanctions, defeated in battle and, with Putin ousted and an interim leader suing for peace on any terms, ripe for break-up. Such was the dream of Europe’s rentiers, their heads already turned by decades of finance, insurance and real estate powering their own economies and manufacturing off-shored to the global south. Intoxicated, the financiers who’d captured government and prioritised risk-free profits over long term planning forgot, if ever they knew or cared, that GDP and wealth creation aren’t the same thing. Not in the West’s finance bloated economies they aren’t. Fighting talk from the EU: Part 1
When Diem25 was born in 2016 we said Europe will democratize or disintegrate. It refused to democratize, so is degenerating into a totalitarian War Union. This is what happens when you have austerity for the many and money printing like there’s no tomorrow for the few. Every time capitalism stagnates, and inequality surges, the official ‘left’ joins the center in a futile attempt to bail out the bankrupt liberal establishment. Do you know what is around the corner every time that happens? Fascism and War, as in the 1930s. Two varieties of totalitarianism began to tussle for power: the radicalized Neo fascist right promises to make us great again: not through ending austerity or exploitation but through a moral Reckoning; a cultural cleansing that targets the impure foreign bodies in the pure body of the nation … on the other side you have the radicalized totalitarian centrists who succeeded in retaining their relevance as the only bulwark against the fascists. How? With policies that deepen the crisis that fuels fascism. This is the definition of a vicious circle. Yanis Varoufakis, below
A friend alerted me to a turbo-charged fourteen minute talk by Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece’s Syriza led government as royally shafted by the EU and IMF in 2015. 1
Today Yanis, a compelling communicator, is one of the Left’s best known public intellectuals. Founder of the Diem25 movement to reform the EU, he is the man most associated with the “techno-feudalism” depiction of rentier capitalism. It’s controversial within Marxism since the feudal mechanism for appropriating surplus wealth – wealth over and above that needed to keep slaves, villeins or wage labourers alive and reproducing – differs in major ways from that of industrial capitalism. But the term is useful to the extent it shows a pattern which is also the focus of Michael Hudson’s work. The eye-watering fortunes amassed by men like Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg and Bezos arise from their ability to extract rents based on monopoly ownerships, bearing scant relationship to actual wealth creation, much as feudal aristocracies extracted unearned rents through monopoly ownership of the land. The implications are profound, some of them touched on in my three posts, Why read Michael Hudson?
Though only a part, and not the most one at that, of Yanis’s theme here, I raise the techno-feudal thing since controversy has a way of getting our attention, negative or otherwise, long before we encounter those it surrounds. Whatever you think of that label, this is about the symbiosis, Tweedledum-Tweedledee, between what Tariq Ali called the Extreme Centre, and a far Right on the rise across the whole of Europe.
The parallels with the 1930s unmistakeable.
Many have noted that symbiosis, as the liberal centrism of Blair’s updating – austerity with ‘woke’ values – of Thatcher’s legacy fuels the far-Right even as while claiming to be the only force capable of stopping it. Whether and to what degree Yanis has feasible remedies I leave for you and history to decide. Chapeaux to the man for so eloquent a starting point for a discussion whose importance our mainstream conversations are incapable of acknowledging.
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- See this transcript of a Michael Hudson interview in 2017: Finance as Warfare: IMF Lent to Greece Knowing It Could Never Pay Back.