Yanis Varoufakis
The 2008 global financial
crisis—the modern 1929 crash—set off a vicious chain reaction across Europe. By
2010 it had irreparably damaged the foundations of the eurozone, causing the
establishment to bend its own rules and commit crimes against logic in order to
bail out its banker friends. By 2013 the neoliberal ideology that had
legitimized the EU’s oligarchic technocracy had plunged millions into misery,
even through the enactment of official policies: socialism for the financiers
and harsh austerity for the many. These policies were practiced as much by
conservatives as by social democrats. By 2015 the surrender of the Syriza
government in Greece had divided and disheartened the left, robbing Europe of
the short-lived hope that progressives’ rising up in the streets would alter
the balance of power.
Since then, anger has combined
with hopelessness to create a vacuum, soon filled by the organized misanthropy
of a Nationalist International triumphing across Europe, and making Donald
Trump a very happy man. Against the background of an establishment that
increasingly resembles the unhappy Weimar Republic, and of the recalcitrant
racists produced by the crisis’s deflationary forces, the European Union is
fragmenting. With Angela Merkel on the way out and Emmanuel Macron’s European
agenda dead on arrival, the European election in May could prove the last
chance progressives have to make a difference at a pan-European level.
Since it was created in 2016,
DiEM25 (Democracy in Europe Movement 2025) has resolved to make the most of
this opportunity. First we prepared our program, the New Deal for Europe. Then
we invited other movements and parties to help develop it and to create,
together, our European Spring—the first transnational list pursuing a common
policy agenda across Europe. Before discussing this project, the left must
address two issues dividing and weakening progressives across Europe: borders
and the EU.
BORDERS VS FREE MOVEMENT
Something very odd has been
happening in recent years: Many on the left have come to view open borders as
bad for the working class. Jean-Luc Mélenchon of La France Insoumise has said
several times, “I’ve never been in favor of freedom of arrival.” In a speech on
posted workers at the European Parliament in July 2016, he said migrants were
“taking the bread out of the mouths” of French workers. He has since regretted
this statement, though his views on the impact of migration on French wages
have not changed.
This is not new. In 1907
Morris Hillquit, the founder of the Socialist Party of America, tabled a
resolution to end “the willful importation of cheap foreign labor,” arguing
that migrants were a “pool of unconscious strikebreakers.” What is new is that
much of the left seems to have forgotten Lenin’s fierce reaction in 1915 to Hillquit’s
call for curbs on migration: “We think that one cannot be internationalist and
be at the same time in favor of such restrictions.… Such socialists are in
reality jingoists.”
Lenin had provided the context
in an article on October 29, 1913: “There can be no doubt
that dire poverty alone compels people to abandon their native land, and that
the capitalists exploit the immigrant workers in the most shameless manner. But
only reactionaries can shut their eyes to the progressive significance of
this modern migration of nations.… capitalism is drawing the masses of the
working people of the whole world…breaking down national barriers and
prejudices, uniting workers from all countries…”
DiEM25 adopts Lenin’s apt
analysis: Walls that curb the free movement of people and goods are a
reactionary response to capitalism. The socialist response is to bring down the
walls and allow capitalism to undermine itself, while we organize transnational
resistance to capitalist exploitation everywhere. It is not migrants who steal
the jobs of native workers but governmental austerity, which is part of the
class war waged on behalf of the domestic bourgeoisie.
This is why we are adamant
that xenophobia-lite must never be allowed to contaminate our agenda. As my
friend Slavoj Žižek says, a leftist nationalism is a cruel and inane response
to National Socialism. So DiEM25’s position on newcomers is that we refuse to
differentiate between migrants and refugees. And we call upon Europe to
#LetThemIn.
THE LEFT’S BEST STRATEGY
Comrades from across Europe
call us utopian and say the EU cannot be reformed. They may well be right. So
for argument’s sake, let us agree that the EU is unreformable. Is progressives’
best response to adopt Lexit (the left-wing campaign for the controlled disintegration
of the EU)? Some of my happiest memories are of addressing large audiences in
Germany in 2015, soon after Syriza’s surrender to Angela Merkel and the troika
(the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank, and European
Commission). They were desperate to convey that what had been done to Greece
had not been done in their name, the name of the German people. I remember how
relieved they were on hearing the DiEM25 call to form one transnational
movement, to unify, to fight together, to seize control of EU
institutions—European Investment Bank (EIB), ECB etc—and redeploy them in the
interests of all Europeans.
I still feel the elation of
our German comrades on hearing our idea to run Greek candidates in Germany and
German candidates in Greece to signify that our movement is transnational, that
it intends to take over the neoliberal order’s institutions everywhere and at
once, not to wreck them but to make them work for the many, in Brussels,
Berlin, Athens, Paris. Everywhere.
Compare this with how they
would have felt had I told them that the EU was unreformable and must be
disbanded; that Greeks must fall back to their nation state and try to build
socialism there, while Germans did the same. Once we succeeded, our delegations
could meet to discuss collaboration between our newly sovereign progressive
states. Our German comrades would undoubtedly have felt deflated, and returned
home depressed, thinking that they would have to face the German establishment
as Germans, not as part of a transnational movement.
If I am right, it does not
matter whether the EU is or isn’t reformable, but it does matter that we put
forward concrete proposals on what we would do with EU institutions. Not
utopian proposals but complete descriptions of what we would do this week, next
month, in the next year, under the existing rules and with the existing
instruments—how we would reassign the role of the awful European Stability
Mechanism, reorient the ECB’s quantitative easing, and finance immediately, and
without new taxes, a green transition and campaign against poverty.
Why such a detailed agenda? To
show voters that there is an alternative, even within the rules designed by the
establishment to further the interests of the top 1 percent. No one expects the
EU institutions to adopt our proposals, least of all us. All we want is for
voters to see what could be done, instead of what is being done, so that they
can see through the establishment without turning to the xenophobic right. This
is the only way the left can escape its confines and build abroad progressive
coalition.
TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC
CONSTITUTION
DiEM25’s New Deal for Europe
aims at this; it shows how the lives of the majority of people can be improved
in the short run under existing rules and with the current institutions. And it
maps out the transformation of these institutions while charting a constitutional
assembly process that will, in the longer run, lead to a democratic European
constitution to replace all existing treaties. And it demonstrates how the new
mechanisms we will be introducing from day one can help us pick up the pieces
if, despite our best efforts, the EU disintegrates.
Everyone talks about the
importance of the green transition. What they do not say is where the money
will come from and who will plan it. Our answer is clear: Europe needs to
invest €2 trillion between 2019 and 2023 in green technologies, energy etc. We
propose that the EIB issues an additional volume of its bonds, €500 billion
annually for four years, and that the ECB announces that, if their value drops,
it will purchase these on the secondary bond market. With that announcement,
and the glut of savings around the world, the ECB will not have to spend a
single euro, as the EIB bonds will sell out. A new European Green Transition
Agency, modeled on the Marshall Plan’s Organization for European Economic
Cooperation (the OECD’s precursor), will channel those funds to green projects
across the continent.
This proposal requires no new
taxes, builds on an existing European bond, and is fully legal under existing
rules. The same applies to our other proposals, such as our Anti-Poverty Fund:
We propose that the billions of profits of the European System of Central Banks
(from assets purchased under the ECB’s quantitative easing or from the Target2
payment system) be used to provide every European under the poverty line with
food, shelter, and energy security.
Another example is our plan to
restructure the eurozone’s public debt: The ECB mediates between states and
money markets to reduce their total debt burden, but without printing money or
making Germany pay for, or guarantee, the public debt of the more indebted
countries.
As these demonstrate, our New
Deal combines technically competent plans, implementable under the EU’s
existing framework, with a radical departure from austerity and the troika’s
bailout logic. And it goes further by tabling new institutions that prepare for
a post-capitalist European future.
A plan for post-capitalism
proposes to partly socialize capital and the returns from automation: Big
business corporations’ right to operate in the EU will be conditional on
transferring a percentage of their shares to a new European Equity Fund. The
dividends from these will then fund a Universal Basic Dividend (UBD) to be paid
to each European citizen independently of other welfare payments or
unemployment insurance.
Our proposals for reforming
the euro are another radical change. Before getting bogged down in changing the
charter of the ECB, we plan to create a public digital-payments platform in
every eurozone country. Using their national tax office’s existing digital
platform, taxpayers would have the opportunity to purchase digital tax credits,
which they can use to pay one another or to pay future taxes at a substantial
discount. These credits would be denominated in euros but transferable only
between taxpayers within a single country, so would be impervious to sudden
capital flight.
Governments would be able to
create a limited number of these fiscal euros, to be given to citizens in need
or used for the funding of public projects; fiscal euros would allow stressed
governments to stimulate demand, lessen the tax burden, and ultimately reduce
the crushing power of the ECB and costs of exiting the euro (or of the euro’s
disintegration). In the long term, public digital-payment platforms would form
a managed system of country-specific euros that work like an International
Clearing Union, a modern version of John Maynard Keynes’s 1944 vision for the
Bretton Woods system, which sadly failed to materialize.
Our New Deal for Europe is a
comprehensive plan for smartly redeploying existing institutions in the
interests of the majority, planning for a radical, post-capitalist green
future, and preparing to pick up the pieces if the EU collapses.
A EUROPEAN SPRING IS POSSIBLE
The left’s great foes are
disunity and incoherence. Unity is crucial, but it should not be pursued at the
expense of coherence. Consider the state of the European Left party: How can it
appeal to voters this May when it is represented in Greece by a party that, in
government, implements the harshest austerity in the history of capitalism on
behalf of the troika, while many of its leading lights in countries like France
and Germany are euroskeptic?
Well-meaning left-wing friends
ask, “Why doesn’t DiEM25 join up with Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise
or Sahra Wagenknecht and Oskar Lafontaine’s Aufstehen movement in Germany? How
can the left make a difference if you fail to unite?” The reason is simple: Our
duty is to create unity on a foundation of radical, rational, and
internationalist humanism. This means a common agenda for all Europeans and a
radical policy of an Open Europe that recognizes borders as scars on the planet
and newcomers as welcome. Nothing less will do.
Our bid for unity was based on
a simple idea: DiEM25 invited all progressives to participate in the joint
authorship of our New Deal for Europe on the basis of radical, humanist
Europeanism. Our call was answered. Génération-s (France), Razem (Poland),
Alternativet (Denmark), DemA (Italy), MeRA25 (Greece), Demokratie in Europa
(Germany), Der Wandel (Austria), Actua (Spain), Livre (Portugal) joined in.
More movements are joining now. Together we have formed the European Spring
coalition that will run in May in the European Parliament election to push for
our project.
Our message to Europe’s
authoritarian establishment: We will resist you through a radical program that
is technically more sophisticated than yours. Our message to the fascistic
xenophobes: We will fight you everywhere. Our message to our comrades of the
European left: You can expect unlimited solidarity from us, and one day our
paths will converge in the service of a radical, transnational humanism.
Yanis
Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and
co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025.
THE NATION's website version
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