Links on Yanis Varoufakis

One of the exciting things about the new SYRIZA government in Greece is that the new finance minister is Yanis Varoufakis, a left economist. I am familiar with him because he has been interviewed many times on Behind the News, the radio show of Left Business Observer editor Doug Henwood.

The latest episode of Behind the News compiles clips from five of those interviews, starting with one from 2008 in which he comments on the street demonstrations by students and unions, running through several interviews about the eurozone crisis, and ending (culminating?) in an interview from November in which Varoufakis talks about how SYRIZA should deal with its creditors if it takes power. Two questions and answers from the end of the interview are especially telling and interesting:

Yanis Varoufakis: "When things go bad and families lose income, their members lose their jobs, it is a natural, I believe, reaction, of people to privatize their concerns and lick their wounds and try to do whatever they can in order to put food on the table. The result is that any radicalism just disappears and what you have is a wave of pessimism that numbs people and causes them to abandon the political--the public--sphere. But that doesn't last forever, and at some point--especially if there is some hope of stabilization, even at very low levels of economic and social activity--something gives, some spark ignites a fire, especially amongst younger people, who just don't believe they deserve to live in a world that treats them as fodder. One hopes that young people will at some point say 'Enough is enough.'"

Doug Henwood: "What would SYRIZA do if it got in power or close to it?"

Yanis Varoufakis: "One word sums it up: negotiate, negotiate, and negotiate. ... But to negotiate, and be taken seriously, you have to have a credible threat. You have to be prepared to blow the whole thing up, simply by being intransigent if you are not taken seriously."

That first stage, when people are "numb," is when Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine kicks in, I take it (and explains why it took so long for Occupy to happen). I recommend listening to the whole episode (it's about an hour), and to the interviews the excerpts come from.  But if you want more quotes of some of the best bits, check out the piece in HuffPo with the inflammatory title, Greece's New Finance Minister: 'You Have To Be Prepared To Blow The Whole Thing Up', which seems to have taken the episode as its main source.

There's been some discussion of Varoufakis on the email list of the Chicago Political Economy Group (CPEG), whose members Ron Baiman and Bill Barclay have blogged here.  That discussion produced more interesting background about Varoufakis, including an interesting blog post by the Australian economist Steve Keen (Steve wrote a piece on debt deflation for our Economic Crisis Reader; Varoufakis taught at Sydney University in the 1980s): My Friend Yanis the Greek Minister of Finance.  And Peter Dorman has a post (Greek Negotiations Begin with a Blast) about SYRIZA's strategy of not engaging with the Troika (the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the EU)--the "negotiate, negotiate, negotiate" of Doug's interview, if you listen closely, is with other European governments, not the Troika. Dorman mentions Varoufakis's background in game theory (though I gather he was mostly a critic of game theory); that is especially interesting given that Varoufakis recently had a consulting position with the video game company Valve Software (as discussed in this episode of Doug's show).

Another good place to get information about Varoufakis is at his own blog, which is in English, and which he promises to keep posting to even as finance minister.