Yanis Varoufakis > Quotes

“The worst slavery is that of heavily indoctrinated happy morons who adore their chains and cannot wait to thank their masters for the joy of their subservience.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism

“Most politicians cannot be theorists. First, because they are rarely thinkers; second, because the frenetic lifestyle they impose on themselves leaves no time for big ideas. But most of all because to be a theorist you have to admit the possibility of being wrong – the provisionality of knowledge – and you know you cannot spin your way out of a theoretical problem.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“As Tony Benn, the British Labour politician, once suggested, we should constantly ask those who govern us five questions: What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“When economists insist that they too are scientists because they use mathematics, they are no different from astrologists protesting that they are just as scientific as astronomers because they also use computers and complicated charts.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism

“Had history been democratic in its ways, there would have been no farming and no industrial revolution. Both leaps into the future were occasioned by unbearably painful crises that made most people wish they could recoil into the past.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“My reason for writing it was the conviction that the economy is too important to leave to the economists.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“All systems of domination work by enveloping us in their narrative and superstitions in such a way that we cannot see beyond them. Taking a step or two back, finding a way to inspect them from the outside, allows us a glimpse of how imperfect, how ludicrous, they are. Securing this glimpse keeps you in touch with reality.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“John Maynard Keynes, wrote the following: “The love of money as a possession … will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“Leonard Schapiro, writing on Stalinism, warned us that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade. But to produce a uniform pattern of public utterances in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“... toxic derivatives were underpinned by toxic economics, which, in turn, were no more than motivated delusions in search of theoretical justification; fundamentalist tracts that acknowledged facts only when they could be accommodated to the demands of the lucrative faith. Despite their highly impressive labels and technical appearance, economic models were merely mathematized versions of the touching superstition that markets know best, both at times of tranquility and in periods of tumult.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy

“Regular crises perpetuate the past by reinvigorating cycles which started long ago. In contrast, (capital-C) Crises are the past's death knell. They function like laboratories in which the future is incubated. They have given us agriculture and the industrial revolution, technology and the labour contract, killer germs and antibiotics. Once they strike, the past ceases to be a reliable predictor of the future and a brave new world is born.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur: America, the True Origins of the Financial Crisis and the Future of the World Economy

“Beneath the specific events that I experienced, I recognised a universal story – the story of what happens when human beings find themselves at the mercy of cruel circumstances that have been generated by an inhuman, mostly unseen network of power relations. This is why there are no ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ in this book. Instead, it is populated by people doing their best, as they understand it, under conditions not of their choosing. Each of the persons I encountered and write about in these pages believed they were acting appropriately, but, taken together, their acts produced misfortune on a continental scale. Is this not the stuff of authentic tragedy? Is this not what makes the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare resonate with us today, hundreds of years after the events they relate became old news?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“When our eyes fall on those who lack the bare necessities, we immediately sympathize and express outrage that they do not have enough, but we do not for a moment allow ourselves to think that their deprivation may be the product of the same process that led to our affluence”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter

“The Matrix is a reflection of our times, or at least our anxieties. It reveals our fear of a mechanization so complete, of a commodification of our bodies and enslavement of our minds so successful, that we are no longer even aware of it, having been made oblivious to our reality by the very technologies that rule us.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“Try mentally to travel to a faraway place, if not necessarily in order to move your world – though how splendid that would be! – but to see it clearly for what it is. Doing so will grant you the opportunity to retain your freedom. And to remain a free spirit as you grow up and make your way in this world, it is essential that you cultivate a rare but crucial freedom: the liberty that comes from knowing how the economy works and from the capacity to answer the trillion-dollar question: ‘Who does what to whom around your neck of the woods and further afield?”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: A Brief History of Capitalism

“And yet it bewildered him that people truly believed capitalism to be about making things or providing services at a profit. He found it extraordinary how most people disliked speculators but thought of them as peripheral, as harmless bubbles on a steady stream of enterprise. They fail to recognize the very opposite is true, […] that enterprise long ago became a bubble on a whirlpool of speculation. That, in reality, workers, inventors and managers resemble driftwood buffeted hither and thither on a manic torrent of runaway finance.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“If you cannot imagine walking out of a negotiation, you should never enter it. If you cannot fathom the idea of an impasse you might as well confine yourself to the role of a supplicant who implores the despot to grant him several privileges”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“What does it mean to be a proletarian, really? [...] It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think, while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value to exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“Austerity is a morality play pressed into the service of legitimizing cynical wealth transfers from the have-nots to the haves during times of crisis, in which debtors are sinners who must be made to pay for their misdeeds.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“Bullies blame their victims. Clever bullies make their victims’ culpability seem self-evident.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“In important ways, we resemble hamsters on their spinning wheels: no matter how fast we run, we are not really going anywhere. We might well conclude that the machines aren’t slaving away for our benefit; at times it even seems like we’re working furiously to maintain them.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“Forcing new loans upon the bankrupt on condition that they shrink their income is nothing short of cruel and unusual punishment. Greece was never bailed out. With their ‘rescue’ loan and their troika of bailiffs enthusiastically slashing incomes, the EU and IMF effectively condemned Greece to a modern version of the Dickensian debtors’ prison and then threw away the key.

Debtors’ prisons were ultimately abandoned because, despite their cruelty, they neither deterred the accumulation of new bad debts nor helped creditors get their money back. For capitalism to advance in the nineteenth century, the absurd notion that all debts are sacred had to be ditched and replaced with the notion of limited liability. After all, if all debts are guaranteed, why should lenders lend responsibly? And why should some debts carry a higher interest rate than other debts, reflecting the higher risk of going bad? Bankruptcy and debt write-downs became for capitalism what hell had always been for Christian dogma – unpleasant yet essential – but curiously bankruptcy-denial was revived in the twenty-first century to deal with the Greek state’s insolvency. Why? Did the EU and the IMF not realize what they were doing?

They knew exactly what they were doing. Despite their meticulous propaganda, in which they insisted that they were trying to save Greece, to grant the Greek people a second chance, to help reform Greece’s chronically crooked state and so on, the world’s most powerful institutions and governments were under no illusions. […]

Banks restructure the debt of stressed corporations every day, not out of philanthropy but out of enlightened self-interest. But the problem was that, now that we had accepted the EU–IMF bailout, we were no longer dealing with banks but with politicians who had lied to their parliaments to convince them to relieve the banks of Greece’s debt and take it on themselves. A debt restructuring would require them to go back to their parliaments and confess their earlier sin, something they would never do voluntarily, fearful of the repercussions. The only alternative was to continue the pretence by giving the Greek government another wad of money with which to pretend to meet its debt repayments to the EU and the IMF: a second bailout.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

“General Motors is alive and kicking today, it is because in 2009 President Obama’s administration wrote off 90 percent of its debt.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

“All babies are born naked, but soon after some are dressed in expensive clothes bought at the best boutiques, while the majority wear rags.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“Corporations go to great lengths to employ geniuses: technologists, designers, financial engineers, economists, artists even. I’ve seen it happen,’ he said. ‘But what have they done with them? They channel all that talent and creativity towards humanity’s destruction. Even when it is creative, Eva, capitalism is extractive. In search of shareholder profit, corporations have put these geniuses in charge of extracting the last morsel of value from humans and from the earth, from the minerals in its guts to the life in its oceans. And these brilliant minds have been used to cajole governments into accepting their raids on the planet’s resources by creating markets for them: markets for carbon dioxide and other pollutants – phoney markets controlled by their employers! Unlike the East India Company, the Technostructure does not need its own armies. It owns our states and their armies, because it controls what we think. The dirtier the industry, the richer and more despised, the more its captains have been able to tap into the rivers of debt-derived money to purchase influence and to blunt opposition. Previously they would buy newspapers and set up TV stations; now they employ armies of lobbyists, found think tanks, litter the Internet with their trolls and, of course, direct monumental campaign donations to the chief enablers of our species’ extinction, the politicians.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

“You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.

First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.

Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract.

Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made.

So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home.

What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit.

By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism

“The black magic of banking destabilizes market societies. It massively amplifies wealth creation during the good times and wealth destruction during the bad times, constantly skewing the distribution of power and money. But to be fair, bankers are just that: massive amplifiers. The root causes of market society’s fundamental instability lie elsewhere, buried deeply in the weird nature of two peculiar commodities: human labour and money.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter

“It is at this point in the book that the author famously laments that despite our ability to bring food from the earth, we are incapable of creating a system in which the hungry can be fed.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Μιλώντας στην κόρη μου για την οικονομία

“...a cynical person is someone who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Our societies tend to make us all cynics. And no one is more cynical than the economist who sees exchange value as the only value, trivializing experiential value as unnecessary in a society where everything is judged according to the criteria of the market.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails

“Los estudios de economía puede que utilicen modelos matemáticos y métodos estadísticos, pero se parecen más a la astrología que a la astronomía.”
― Yanis Varoufakis, Economía sin corbata: Conversaciones con mi hija