'Are We All Soviets Now?'

 

The con behind every wedding

Anon in The Guardian

A lavish wedding, a couple in love; romance was in the air, as it should be when two people are getting married. But on the top table, the mothers of the happy pair were bonding over their imminent plans for … divorce.

That story was told to me by the mother of the bride. The wedding in question was two summers ago: she is now divorced, and the bridegroom’s parents are separated. “We couldn’t but be aware of the crushing irony of the situation,” said my friend. “There we were, celebrating our children’s marriage, while plotting our own escapes from relationships that had long ago gone sour, and had probably been held together by our children. Now they were off to start their lives together, we could be off, too – on our own, or in search of new partners.”

It’s bittersweet, this clash of romantic hope and lived experience. I am living it now, yo-yo-ing between the wedding plans of my daughter and son, both in their 20s, and the fragility and disappointment of my own long marriage. My days seem to be divided between excited chat about embryonic relationships that are absolutely perfect, and definitely going to last for ever, and remote and cold exchanges with a husband who has disentangled himself emotionally from me, and shows no signs of wanting to reconnect (I have suggested Relate many times; he is simply not interested).

To some extent, this juxtaposition of young love and old cynicism was ever thus: throughout time, weddings have featured, centre-stage, a loved-up duo who believe their devotion to one another will last for ever, while observing from the wings are two couples 30, 35 or more years down the line, battle-scarred by experience, and entirely devoid of rose-tinted spectacles – the parents of the bride and groom. And in the generation of “silver splitters”, these sixtysomethings are more likely than ever to be in the process of uncoupling, at the precise moment when their offspring are embracing the dream of lifelong partnership.

So how do we reconcile our cynicism – or, at best, our scepticism – for marriage and long-term love, with our offsprings’ enthusiasm to tie the knot, and embark on a life of seeming marital bliss? On one level, the phenomenon is heartwarming. It is testament, you could argue, to the resilience of the human spirit: however difficult our own marriages turned out to be, we war veterans look at our kids staring into each other’s eyes, and we melt inside. Yes, we think to ourselves, we made mistakes; we took paths that turned out to be wrong. Even, we think, we made fundamentally bad choices: we married the wrong men.

As a result, love was seriously skewed for us: but in the next generation – we nod our heads vigorously to this, while cheerily agreeing to a no-holds-barred expensive wedding – things will be different. True love will be theirs; the fairytale that eluded us will work for them, at last.

What hokum. As the survivor of a difficult marriage, this much I know: the biggest burden is the disappointment. And it is a disappointment born on my own wedding day in 1985: more than three decades later, the hopes of that morning still glint from the shadows. The expectations heaped on us, including by my in-laws whose own miserable marriage still had another two decades left to torture them, are the ghosts around the sad embers of our once-glowing fire.
So what can we do differently? Here’s the truth of it, as a wise friend said to me recently: in the 21st century, in a world in which women as well as men have choices and independence and long lives (all good), it will be increasingly difficult for one individual to answer the emotional, spiritual and physical needs of another, across many decades. Life is different now: we have bigger imaginations, we have higher expectations, we have more opportunities and, crucially, those opportunities continue well on into our 50s, 60s and 70s – and for all I know, into our 80s and 90s too. Even more significantly, we women have these opportunities: for men, they are less of a novelty. But their more widespread existence is the agent of seismic change in intimate relationships. We no longer need to put up with misery; we can alter the way we live.

I suggest that we, the parental generation, take a subtle lead in being honest with our twenty- and thirtysomethings about the realities of relationships, and love, and longevity, and choices. That we stop buying into the burgeoning and ever-more-elaborate wedding industry, a giant luxury liner that sails full-steam ahead, oblivious to the lifeboats and shipwrecks all around it in the water. At least begin to ask questions of the commercial interest that operates that liner, of its intentions and its fallout (not to mention its profits). There is more than coincidence, surely, in the way we seem to invest more and more resources in marriages that are less and less likely to survive.

How we introduce these notes of caution into our children’s lives is a much more difficult task. As parents, we want nothing more than happiness for our offspring: none of us wants to burst their bubble, at the precise moment it is so expanded.

As so often with parenting, though, we have to take the longer view. Sometimes I think that, even though my children may not understand or welcome some of the messages they get from me now, with me in my mid-50s and them in their mid-20s, there may be moments in the future when what I said, or how I behaved, suddenly makes sense. Parenting means filling your children’s backpack with supplies, and some of the supplies down the bottom of the bag may not be needed for many years to come.

One important factor in all this was raised by Sylvia Brownrigg in these pages earlier this year, and it is this: children are not interested in their parents’ relationships. They’re not interested in their parents’ marriage (beyond hoping that it is incident-free, and as calm as possible) and they are certainly not interested in their parents’ other relationships, if those happen or are ongoing. So we cannot weigh them down with the detail of why our marriages are failing, or unhappy, or disappointing – and yet, we must somehow signal to them that life is a long journey, and that it may be a mistake to invest too much in one central relationship on into the far distant future.

We are pioneers, us fifty- and sixtysomething mothers; we are walking a tightrope, and it is difficult to get the balance right. Sometimes we wobble; sometimes we fall right off. But the fact that we are walking the tightrope at all is the important bit. We are trying to be authentic, to our burnt-out marriages and to ourselves, as well as to our children and the realities of their future.

And choices cut both ways, too. Remember those mothers at the wedding party? My friend, as I say, is now divorced; but the bridegroom’s parents are having counselling, and have not ruled out the possibility of sharing their lives again.

Being more ambitious for ourselves doesn’t mean our marriages can’t survive, but it does mean a bad marriage can only survive if it can change. And that surely is the message, and the hope, we want to give our children, as they taste the realities of long-term love, or long-term what-was-once-love, and what just possibly might be love once again.

Protest and persist: why giving up hope is not an option

Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian


Last month, Daniel Ellsberg and Edward Snowden had a public conversation about democracy, transparency, whistleblowing and more. In the course of it, Snowden – who was of course Skyping in from Moscow – said that without Ellsberg’s example he would not have done what he did to expose the extent to which the NSA was spying on millions of ordinary people. It was an extraordinary declaration. It meant that the consequences of Ellsberg’s release of the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971 were not limited to the impact on a presidency and a war in the 1970s. The consequences were not limited to people alive at that moment. His act was to have an impact on people decades later – Snowden was born 12 years after Ellsberg risked his future for the sake of his principles. Actions often ripple far beyond their immediate objective, and remembering this is reason to live by principle and act in hope that what you do matters, even when results are unlikely to be immediate or obvious.

The most important effects are often the most indirect. I sometimes wonder when I’m at a mass march like the Women’s March a month ago whether the reason it matters is because some unknown young person is going to find her purpose in life that will only be evident to the rest of us when she changes the world in 20 years, when she becomes a great liberator.

I began talking about hope in 2003, in the bleak days after the war in Iraq was launched. Fourteen years later, I use the term hope because it navigates a way forward between the false certainties of optimism and of pessimism, and the complacency or passivity that goes with both. Optimism assumes that all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us stay home and do nothing. Hope for me has meant a sense that the future is unpredictable, and that we don’t actually know what will happen, but know we may be able write it ourselves.

Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we may play in it. Hope looks forward, but it draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not being the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us.

We are complex creatures. Hope and anguish can coexist within us and in our movements and analyses. There’s a scene in the new movie about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, in which Robert Kennedy predicts, in 1968, that in 40 years there will be a black president. It’s an astonishing prophecy since four decades later Barack Obama wins the presidential election, but Baldwin jeers at it because the way Kennedy has presented it does not acknowledge that even the most magnificent pie in the sky might comfort white people who don’t like racism but doesn’t wash away the pain and indignation of black people suffering that racism in the here and now. Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, early on described the movement’s mission as “rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams”. The vision of a better future doesn’t have to deny the crimes and sufferings of the present; it matters because of that horror.


Optimism assumes all will go well without our effort; pessimism assumes it’s all irredeemable; both let us do nothing

I have been moved and thrilled and amazed by the strength, breadth, depth and generosity of the resistance to the Trump administration and its agenda. I did not anticipate anything so bold, so pervasive, something that would include state governments, many government employees from governors and mayors to workers in many federal departments, small towns in red states, new organizations like the 6,000 chapters of Indivisible reportedly formed since the election, new and fortified immigrant-rights groups, religious groups, one of the biggest demonstrations in American history with the Women’s March on 21 January, and so much more.

I’ve also been worried about whether it will endure. Newcomers often think that results are either immediate or they’re nonexistent. That if you don’t succeed straight away, you failed. Such a framework makes many give up and go back home when the momentum is building and victories are within reach. This is a dangerous mistake I’ve seen over and over. What follows is the defense of a complex calculus of change, instead of the simple arithmetic of short-term cause and effect.

There’s a bookstore I love in Manhattan, the Housing Works bookshop, which I’ve gone to for years for a bite to eat and a superb selection of used books. Last October my friend Gavin Browning, who works at Columbia University but volunteers with Housing Works, reminded me what the name means. Housing Works is a spinoff of Act Up, the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, founded at the height of the Aids crisis, to push for access to experimental drugs, bring awareness to the direness of the epidemic, and not go gentle into that bad night of premature death.

What did Act Up do? The group of furious, fierce activists, many of them dangerously ill and dying, changed how we think about Aids. They pushed to speed up drug trials, deal with the many symptoms and complications of Aids together, pushed on policy, education, outreach, funding. They taught people with Aids and their allies in other countries how to fight the drug companies for affordable access to what they needed. And win.

Members of Act Up, the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power, at the Gay and Lesbian Pride March in New York City on 26 June 1988.

Browning recently wrote: “At the start of the 1990s, New York City had less than 350 units of housing set aside for an estimated 13,000 homeless individuals living with HIV/Aids. In response, four members of the Act Up housing committee founded Housing Works in 1990.” They still quietly provide a broad array of services, including housing, to HIV-positive people 27 years later. All I saw was a bookstore; I missed a lot. Act Up’s work is not over, in any sense.

For many groups, movements and uprisings, there are spinoffs, daughters, domino effects, chain reactions, new models and examples and templates and toolboxes that emerge from the experiments, and every round of activism is an experiment whose results can be applied to other situations. To be hopeful, we need not only to embrace uncertainty but to be willing to know that the consequences may be immeasurable, may still be unfolding, may be as indirect as poor people on other continents getting access to medicine because activists in the USA stood up and refused to accept things as they were. Think of hope as a banner woven from those gossamer threads, from a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, of the lasting effect of the best actions, not only the worst. Of an indivisible world in which everything matters.

An old woman said at the outset of Occupy Wall Street “we’re fighting for a society in which everyone is important”, the most beautifully concise summary of what a compassionately radical, deeply democratic movement might aim to do. Occupy Wall Street was mocked and described as chaotic and ineffectual in its first weeks, and then when it spread nationwide and beyond, as failing or failed, by pundits who had simple metrics of what success should look like. The original occupation in lower Manhattan was broken up in November 2011, but many of the encampments inspired by it lasted far longer. 

Occupy launched a movement against student debt and opportunistic for-profit colleges; it shed light on the pain and brutality of the financial collapse and the American debt-peonage system. It called out economic inequality in a new way. California passed a homeowner’s bill of rights to push back at predatory lenders; a housing defense movement arose in the wake of Occupy that, house by house, protected many vulnerable homeowners. Each Occupy had its own engagement with local government and its own projects; a year ago people involved with local Occupies told me the thriving offshoots still make a difference. Occupy persists, but you have to learn to recognize the myriad forms in which it does so, none of which look much like Occupy Wall Street as a crowd in a square in lower Manhattan.

Similarly, I think it’s a mistake to regard the gathering of tribes and activists at Standing Rock, North Dakota, as something we can measure by whether or not it defeats a pipeline. You could go past that to note that merely delaying completion beyond 1 January cost the investors a fortune, and that the tremendous movement that has generated widespread divestment and a lot of scrutiny of hitherto invisible corporations and environmental destruction makes building pipelines look like a riskier, potentially less profitable business.

Standing Rock was vaster than these practical things. At its height it was almost certainly the biggest political gathering of Native North Americans ever seen, said to be the first time all seven bands of the Lakota had come together since they defeated Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876, one that made an often-invisible tribe visible around the world. What unfolded there seemed as though it might not undo one pipeline but write a radical new chapter to a history of more than 500 years of colonial brutality, centuries of loss, dehumanization and dispossession. Thousands of veterans came to defend the encampment and help prevent the pipeline. In one momentous ceremony, many of the former soldiers knelt down to apologize and ask forgiveness for the US army’s long role in oppressing Native Americans. Like the Native American occupation of Alcatraz Island at the end of the 1960s, Standing Rock has been a catalyst for a sense of power, pride, destiny. It is an affirmation of solidarity and interconnection, an education for people who didn’t know much about native rights and wrongs, an affirmation for Native people who often remember history in passionate detail. It is a confirmation of the deep ties between the climate movement and indigenous rights that has played a huge role in stopping pipelines in and from Canada. It has inspired and informed young people who may have half a century or more of good work yet to do. It has been a beacon whose meaning stretches beyond that time and place.

To know history is to be able to see beyond the present, to remember the past gives you capacity to look forward as well, it’s to see that everything changes and the most dramatic changes are often the most unforeseen. I want to go into one part of our history at greater length to explore these questions about consequences that go beyond simple cause and effect.

 

A ‘water protector’ at Standing Rock, where thousands gathered to protest the Dakota Access pipeline and its threat to the Missouri river. Photograph: Pacific Press/Rex/Shutterstock

The 1970s anti-nuclear movement was a potent force in its time, now seldom remembered, though its influence is still with us. In her important new book Direct Action: Protest and the Reinvention of American Radicalism, LA Kauffman reports that the first significant action against nuclear power, in 1976, was inspired by an extraordinary protest the previous year in West Germany, which had forced the government to abandon plans to build a nuclear reactor. A group that called itself the Clamshell Alliance arose to oppose building a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. Despite creative tactics, great movement building, and extensive media coverage against the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, the activists did not stop the plant.

They did inspire a sister organization, the Abalone Alliance in central California, which used similar strategies to try to stop the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. The groups protested against two particular nuclear power plants; those two plants opened anyway.

You can call that a failure, but Kauffman notes that it inspired people around the country to organize their own anti-nuclear groups, a movement that brought about the cancellation of more than 100 planned nuclear projects over several years and raised public awareness and changed public opinion about nuclear power. Then she gets into the really exciting part, writing that the Clamshell Alliance’s “most striking legacy was in consolidating and promoting what became the dominant model for large-scale direct-action organizing for the next 40 years. It was picked up by … the Pledge of Resistance, a nationwide network of groups organized against US policy in Central America” in the 1980s.

“Hundreds more employed it that fall in a civil disobedience action to protest the supreme court’s anti-gay Bowers vs Hardwick sodomy decision,” Kauffman continues. “The Aids activist group Act Up used a version of this model when it organized bold takeovers of the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration in 1988 and the National Institutes of Health in 1990, to pressure both institution to take swifter action toward approving experimental Aids medication.” And on into the current millennium. But what were the strategies and organizing principles they catalyzed?

The short answer is non-violent direct action, externally, and consensus decision-making process, internally. The former has a history that reaches around the world, the latter that stretches back to the early history of European dissidents in North America. That is, non-violence is a strategy articulated by Mohandas Gandhi, first used by residents of Indian descent to protest against discrimination in South Africa on 11 September 1906. The young lawyer’s sense of possibility and power was expanded immediately afterward when he traveled to London to pursue his cause. Three days after he arrived, British women battling for the right to vote occupied the British parliament, and 11 were arrested, refused to pay their fines, and were sent to prison. They made a deep impression on Gandhi.

He wrote about them in a piece titled “Deeds Better than Words” quoting Jane Cobden, the sister of one of the arrestees, who said, “I shall never obey any law in the making of which I have had no hand; I will not accept the authority of the court executing those laws …” Gandhi declared: “Today the whole country is laughing at them, and they have only a few people on their side. But undaunted, these women work on steadfast in their cause. They are bound to succeed and gain the franchise …” And he saw that if they could win, so could the Indian citizens in British Africa fighting for their rights. In the same article (in 1906!) he prophesied: “When the time comes, India’s bonds will snap of themselves.” Ideas are contagious, emotions are contagious, hope is contagious, courage is contagious. When we embody those qualities, or their opposites, we convey them to others.


You do what you can. What you’ve done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come


That is to say, British suffragists, who won limited access to the vote for women in 1918, full access in 1928, played a part in inspiring an Indian man who 20 years later led the liberation of the Asian subcontinent from British rule. He, in turn, inspired a black man in the American south to study his ideas and their application. After a 1959 pilgrimage to India to meet with Gandhi’s heirs, Martin Luther King wrote: “While the Montgomery boycott was going on, India’s Gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of non-violent social change. We spoke of him often.” Those techniques, further developed by the civil rights movement, were taken up around the world, including in the struggle against apartheid at one end of the African continent and to the Arab spring at the other.

Participation in the civil rights movement of the early 1960s shaped many lives. One of them is John Lewis, one of the first Freedom Riders, a young leader of the lunch counter sit-ins, a victim of a brutal beating that broke his skull on the Selma march. Lewis was one of the boldest in questioning Trump’s legitimacy and he led dozens of other Democratic members of Congress in boycotting the inauguration. When the attack on Muslim refugees and immigrants began a week after Trump’s inauguration, he showed up at the Atlanta airport.

That’s a lot to take in. But let me put it this way. When those women were arrested in parliament, they were fighting for the right of British women to vote. They succeeded in liberating themselves. But they also passed along tactics, spirit and defiance. You can trace a lineage backward to the anti-slavery movement that inspired the American women’s suffrage movement, forward right up to John Lewis standing up for refugees and Muslims in the Atlanta airport this year. We are carried along by the heroines and heroes who came before and opened the doors of possibility and imagination.

My partner likes to quote a line of Michel Foucault: “People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” You do what you can. What you’ve done may do more than you can imagine for generations to come. You plant a seed and a tree grows from it; will there be fruit, shade, habitat for birds, more seeds, a forest, wood to build a cradle or a house? You don’t know. A tree can live much longer than you. So will an idea, and sometimes the changes that result from accepting that new idea about what is true, right, just remake the world. You do what you can do; you do your best; what what you do does is not up to you.

Schoolchildren dress as Gandhi during celebrations to mark the 143rd anniversary of his birth. Photograph: Babu/Reuters

That’s a way to remember the legacy of the external practice of non-violent civil disobedience used by the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s, as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which did so much to expand and refine the techniques.

As for the internal process: in Direct Action, Kauffman addresses the Clamshell Alliance’s influences, quoting a participant named Ynestra King who said: “Certain forms that had been learned from feminism were just naturally introduced into the situation and a certain ethos of respect, which was reinforced by the Quaker tradition.” Suki Rice and Elizabeth Boardman, early participants in the Clamshell Alliance, as Kauffman relates, were influenced by the Quakers, and they brought the Quaker practice of consensus decision-making to the new group: “The idea was to ensure that no one’s voice was silenced, that there was no division between leaders and followers.” The Quakers have been since the 17th century radical dissidents who opposed war, hierarchical structures and much else. An organizer named Joanne Sheehan said, “while non-violence training, doing actions in small groups, and agreeing to a set of non-violence guidelines were not new, it was new to blend them in combination with a commitment to consensus decision-making and a non-hierarchical structure.” They were making a way of operating and organizing that spread throughout the progressive activist world.

There are terrible stories about how diseases like Aids jump species and mutate. There are also ideas and tactics that jump communities and mutate, to our benefit. There is an evil term, collateral damage, for the people who die unintentionally: the civilians, non-participants, etc. Maybe what I am proposing here is an idea of collateral benefit.


Ideas are contagious, hope is contagious, courage is contagious. When we embody those qualities we convey them to others

What we call democracy is often a majority rule that leaves the minority, even 49.9% of the people – or more if it’s a three-way vote – out in the cold. Consensus leaves no one out. After Clamshell, it jumped into radical politics and reshaped them, making them more generously inclusive and egalitarian. And it’s been honed and refined and used by nearly every movement I’ve been a part of or witnessed, from the anti-nuclear actions at the Nevada test site in the 1980s and 1990s to the organization of the shutdown of the World Trade Organization in late 1999, a victory against neoliberalism that changed the fate of the world, to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and after.

So what did the Clamshell Alliance achieve? Everything but its putative goal. Tools to change the world, over and over. There are crimes against humanity, crimes against nature, and other forms of destruction that we need to stop as rapidly as possible, and the endeavors to do so are under way. They are informed by these earlier activists, equipped with the tools they developed. But the efforts against these things can have a longer legacy, if we learn to recognize collateral benefits and indirect effects.

If you are a member of civil society, if you demonstrate and call your representatives and donate to human rights campaigns, you will see politicians and judges and the powerful take or be given credit for the changes you effected, sometimes after resisting and opposing them. You will have to believe in your own power and impact anyway. You will have to keep in mind that many of our greatest victories are what doesn’t happen: what isn’t built or destroyed, deregulated or legitimized, passed into law or tolerated in the culture. Things disappear because of our efforts and we forget they were there, which is a way to forget we tried and won.

Even losing can be part of the process: as the bills to abolish slavery in the British empire failed over and over again, the ideas behind them spread, until 27 years after the first bill was introduced, a version finally passed. You will have to remember that the media usually likes to tell simple, direct stories in which if a court rules or an elective body passes a law, that action reflects the actors’ own beneficence or insight or evolution. They will seldom go further to explore how that perspective was shaped by the nameless and unsung, by the people whose actions built up a new world or worldview the way that innumerable corals build a reef.

The only power adequate to stop the Trump administration is civil society, which is the great majority of us when we remember our power and come together. And even if we remember, even if we exert all the pressure we’re capable of, even if the administration collapses immediately, or the president resigns or is impeached or melts into a puddle of corruption, our work will only have begun.

International Women’s Day 2017. ‘Actions often ripple far beyond their immediate objective, even when results are unlikely to be immediate or obvious.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

That job begins with opposing the Trump administration but will not end until we have made deep systemic changes and recommitted ourselves, not just as a revolution, because revolutions don’t last, but as a civil society with values of equality, democracy, inclusion, full participation, a radical e pluribus unum plus compassion. As has often been noted, the Republican revolution that allowed them to take over so many state houses and take power far beyond their numbers came partly from corporate cash, but partly from the willingness to do the slow, plodding, patient work of building and maintaining power from the ground up and being in it for the long run. And partly from telling stories that, though often deeply distorting the facts and forces at play, were compelling. This work is always, first and last, storytelling work, or what some of my friends call “the battle of the story”. Building, remembering, retelling, celebrating our own stories is part of our work.

I want to see this glorious resistance have a long game, one that includes re-enfranchising the many millions, perhaps tens of millions of people of color, poor people, and students disenfranchised by many means: the Crosscheck program, voter ID laws that proceed from the falsehood that voter fraud is a serious problem that affects election outcomes, the laws taking voting rights in most states from those convicted of felonies. I am encouraged to see many idealistic activists bent on reforming the Democratic party, and a new level of participation inside and outside electoral politics. Reports say that the offices of elected officials are swamped with calls and emails as never before.

This will only matter if it’s sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren’t immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective – to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill – that even then you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change inevitable. You may change the story or the rules, give tools, templates or encouragement to future activists, and make it possible for those around you to persist in their efforts.

To believe it matters – well, we can’t see the future. We have the past. Which gives us patterns, models, parallels, principles and resources, and stories of heroism, brilliance, persistence, and the deep joy to be found in doing the work that matters. With those in our pockets, we can seize the possibilities and begin to make hopes into actualities.

Don’t fall for the new hopelessness. We still have the power to bring change

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian

 

After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: ‘You don’t start worrying about apocalypse.’ Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock


A friend posts a picture of a baby. A beautiful baby. A child is brought into the world, this world, and I like it on Facebook because I like it in real life. If anything can be an unreservedly good thing it is a baby. But no ... someone else says to me, while airily discussing how terrible everything is: “I don’t know why anyone would have a child now.” As though any child was ever born of reason. I wonder at their mental state, but soon read that a war between the superpowers is likely. The doom and gloom begins to get to me. There is no sealant against the dread, the constant drip of the talk of end times.
I stay up into the small hours watching the footage of triumphant white nationalists sieg-heiling with excited hesitancy. My dreams are contaminated – at the edge of them, Trump roams the Black Lodge from Twin Peaks. But then I wake up and think: “Enough.” Enough of this competitive hopelessness.

Loss is loss. Our side has taken some heavy hits, the bad guys are in charge. Some take solace in the fact that the bad guys don’t know what they are doing: Farage, Trump, Johnson, Ukip donor Arron Banks, wear their ignorance as a badge of pride. One of the “liberal” values that has been overturned is apparently basic respect for knowledge. Wilful ignorance and inadequacy is now lauded as authenticity.

However, the biggest casualty for my generation is the idea that progress is linear. Things really would get better and better, we said; the world would somehow by itself become more open, equal, tolerant, as though everything would evolve in our own self-image. Long before Brexit or the US election, it was clear that this was not the case. I have often written about the way younger generations have had more and more stripped away from them: access to education, jobs and housing. Things have not been getting better and they know that inequality has solidified. Materially, they are suffering, but culturally and demographically the resistance to authoritarian populism, or whatever we want to call this movement of men old before their time, will come from the young. It will come also from the many for whom racism or sexism in society is nothing new.

Resistance can’t come personally or politically from the abject pessimism that prevails now. Of course, anger, despair, denial are all stages of grief, and the joys of nihilism are infinite. I am relieved that we are all going to die in a solar flare, anyway, but until then pessimism replayed as easy cynicism and inertia is not going to get us anywhere. The relentless wallowing in every detail of Trump or Farage’s infinite idiocy is drowning, not waving. The oft-repeated idea that history is a loop and that this is a replay of the1930s induces nothing but terror. Nothing is a foregone conclusion. That is why we learn history.

I am not asking for false optimism here, but a way to exist in the world that does not lead to feelings of absolute powerlessness. A mass retreat into the internal, small sphere of the domestic, the redecoration of one’s own safe space, is understandable, but so much of what has happened has been just this abandonment of any shared or civic space. It is absolutely to the advantage of these far-right scaremongers that we stay in our little boxes, fearing “the streets”, fearing difference, seeing danger everywhere.

Thinking for ourselves is, to use a bad word, empowering. It also demands that we give up some of the ridiculous binaries of the left. The choice between class politics and identity politics is a false one. All politics is identity politics. It is clear that economic and cultural marginalisation intertwine and that they often produce a rejection of basic modernity. Economic anxiety manifests in a longing for a time when everything was in its place and certain. But the energy of youth disrupts this immediately, as many young people are born into a modernity that does not accept that everything is fixed, whether that is sexuality or a job for life. Telling them: “We are all doomed” says something about the passivity of my generation, not theirs.

The historian and activist Howard Zinn said in his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: “Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: it reproduces by crippling our willingness to act.”

Indeed. Campaigning for reproductive rights isn’t something that suddenly has to be done because of Trump. It always has to be done. LGBT people did not “win”. The great fault line of race has been exposed, but it was never just theoretical. The idea that any of these struggles were over could be maintained only if you were not involved in them.

After the election, Obama told his daughters to carry on: “You don’t get into a foetal position about it. You don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say: ‘OK, where are the places where I can push to keep it moving forward.’”

Where can you push to keep it moving forward? Locally? Globally? Get out of that foetal position. Look at some cats online if it helps. We render those in power even more powerful if we act as though everything is a done deal. Take back control.

Brexit is a disaster, but we can build on the ruins

 

A voter leaves a polling station at the Elim Pentecostal church in Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


GeorgeMonbiot in The Guardian


Let’s sack the electorate and appoint a new one: this is the demand made by MPs, lawyers and the 4 million people who have signed the petition calling for a second referendum. It’s a cry of pain, and therefore understandable, but it’s also bad politics and bad democracy. Reduced to its essence, it amounts to graduates telling nongraduates: “We reject your democratic choice.”

Were this vote to be annulled (it won’t be), the result would be a full-scale class and culture war, riots and perhaps worse, pitching middle-class progressives against those on whose behalf they have claimed to speak, and permanently alienating people who have spent their lives feeling voiceless and powerless.

Yes, the Brexit vote has empowered the most gruesome collection of schemers, misfits, liars, extremists and puppets that British politics has produced in the modern era. It threatens to invoke a new age of demagoguery, a threat sharpened by the thought that if this can happen, so can Donald Trump.

It has provoked a resurgence of racism and an economic crisis whose dimensions remain unknown. It jeopardises the living world, the NHS, peace in Ireland and the rest of the European Union. It promotes what the billionaire Peter Hargreaves gleefully anticipated as “fantastic insecurity”.

But we’re stuck with it. There isn’t another option, unless you favour the years of limbo and chaos that would ensue from a continued failure to trigger article 50. It’s not just that we have no choice but to accept the result; we should embrace it and make of it what we can.

It’s not as if the system that’s now crashing around us was functioning. The vote could be seen as a self-inflicted wound, or it could be seen as the eruption of an internal wound inflicted over many years by an economic oligarchy on the poor and the forgotten. The bogus theories on which our politics and economics are founded were going to collide with reality one day. The only questions were how and when.

Yes, the Brexit campaign was led by a political elite, funded by an economic elite and fuelled by a media elite. Yes, popular anger was channelled towards undeserving targets – migrants.

But the vote was also a howl of rage against exclusion, alienation and remote authority. That is why the slogan “take back control” resonated. If the left can’t work with this, what are we for?

So here is where we find ourselves. The economic system is not working, except for the likes of Philip Green. Neoliberalism has not delivered the meritocratic nirvana its theorists promised, but a rentiers’ paradise, offering staggering returns to whoever grabs the castle first while leaving productive workers on the wrong side of the moat.

The age of enterprise has become the age of unearned income, the age of the market the age of market failure, the age of opportunity a steel cage of zero-hours contracts, precarity and surveillance.

The political system is not working. Whoever you vote for, the same people win, because where power claims to be is not where power is.

Parliaments and councils embody paralysed force, gesture without motion, as the real decisions are taken elsewhere: by the money, for the money. Governments have actively conspired in this shift, negotiating fake trade treaties behind their voters’ backs to prevent democracy from controlling corporate capital.

Unreformed political funding ensures that parties have to listen to the rustle of notes before the bustle of votes. In Britain these problems are compounded by an electoral system that ensures most votes don’t count. This is why a referendum is almost the only means by which people can be heard, and why attempting to override it is a terrible idea.

Culture is not working. A worldview that insists both people and place are fungible is inherently hostile to the need for belonging. For years now we have been told that we do not belong, that we should shift out without complaint while others are shifted in to take our place.

When the peculiarities of community and place are swept away by the tides of capital, all that’s left is a globalised shopping culture, in which we engage with glazed passivity. Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chainstores.

In all these crises are opportunities – opportunities to reject, connect and erect, to build from these ruins a system that works for the people of this country rather than for an offshore elite that preys on insecurity.

If it is true that Britain will have to renegotiate its trade treaties, is this not the best chance we’ve had in decades to contain corporate power – of insisting that companies that operate here must offer proper contracts, share their profits, cut their emissions and pay their taxes? Is it not a chance to regain control of the public services slipping from our grasp?

How will politics in this sclerotic nation change without a maelstrom? In this chaos we can, if we are quick and clever, find a chance to strike a new contract: proportional representation, real devolution and a radical reform of campaign finance to ensure that millionaires can never again own our politics.

Remote authority has been rejected, so let’s use this moment to root our politics in a common celebration of place, to fight the epidemic of loneliness and rekindle common purpose, transcending the tensions between recent and less recent migrants (which means everyone else). In doing so, we might find a language in which liberal graduates can talk with the alienated people of Britain, rather than at them.

But most importantly, let’s address the task that the left and the centre have catastrophically neglected: developing a political and economic philosophy fit for the 21st century, rather than repeatedly microwaving the leftovers of the 20th (neoliberalism and Keynesianism). If the history of the last 80 years tells us anything, it’s that little changes without a new and ferocious framework of thought.
So yes, despair and rage and curse at what has happened: there are reasons enough to do so. But then raise your eyes to where hope lies.

Interview with Yanis Varoufakis

Courtesy The Economist 

Greece’s former finance minister talks Greece, Europe, the Labour Party and the future of social democracy

YANIS VAROUFAKIS is a Greek economist who served as finance minister in his country's Syriza government from January to September last year. After this approved the third bailout package, which he described as a surrender, he declined to stand in fresh elections and set about founding DiEM25, an international "movement" committed to overhauling the European Union's institutions and agenda. Recently he gave a wide-ranging interview to The Economist at his flat in Athens. This concentrated primarily on the poor state of social democratic parties across the continent (the subject of a briefing in this week’s issue) but also ranged across events in Greece last year, DiEM25 and politics in Spain, Germany and Britain, where it was recently revealed that he is advising Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader.

The Economist: We’ve gone through a crisis in which the limitations of untrammelled capitalism were made clear. Back in 2008-09 the social democrats thought they were living through a social democratic moment. But here we are a few years later and they have tanked. What’s your explanation for that?

Yanis Varoufakis: A few years ago I was invited to Vienna to address the Kreisky Forum [a social democratic Austrian think-tank]. That’s where I first articulated what I am going to tell you now. Social democracy is the result of the split of the Second International, between the traditional Marxist-Communist line that capitalism could not be civilised and the social democratic path of proposing change through the ballot box and some accommodation—the mixed economy. When I was a young man the dominant theme was pretty social democratic (even the Tories had accepted it). It was the idea of a mixed economy, i.e. that certain areas of the economy need to be left to the market and others that have to be dominated by the state. Behind that was this notion that started in Germany with Kautsky and the social democratic tradition that began in the 1910s, -20s, -30s with the SPD, which spread out and influenced the Labour Party and so forth. The main idea was that yes, there is class conflict, there is a tug of war between profit and the wage bill, but the role of the state is to regulate this, to forge a social contract, to press capital to deliver part of its return to the state so the state can provide the welfare net and some redistribution of profits towards wages. That was the social democratic project. During the Bretton Woods era, the post-1950 period, it was put in practice. It was dominant. You had the government mediating between trades unions and employers (primarily the industrial sector) to effect this transfer, and to convince industrialists to give up a percentage of their profits to the state to fund welfare institutions. Harold Wilson did it in Britain. Willy Brandt did it in Germany. Bruno Kreisky did it in Austria.

That was the electoral high point as well. That is what social democracy was about. But then Bretton Woods died in the 1970s and all hell broke loose. My next book will be about that (it’s out in April). And we entered the era of financialisation. How it came about is a long story. It has to do with American global dominance. But for the purposes of our conversation what matters is financialisation. The most potent moment in this phenomenon was the shift from options to sell to options to buy. This transition was critical. You have an option to sell as an insurance when you are buying. If you buy shares, you buy an option to sell at a minimum price; you’re hedging in case the share you purchased tanks.


But an option to buy is speculation?

Yes. So by moving from one to the other we licensed the financial sector to print its own money. And to make a great deal of profit on the upside. It was at that point that various social democratic parties cottoned on to this. Put simply, being the prime minister in Britain—Callaghan, or Blair later, or Schröder in Germany—and constantly having to fight with industrialists to keep taxing them more, being badmouthed by them, by the press they influence, is not pleasant. Much easier to say: “OK, stuff that. I’m going to have a Faustian bargain with the bankers, with the financial sector. I will turn a blind eye to your shenanigans and you will give me a cut.”


That bargain was struck out of electoral necessity. 

No. It was the path of least resistance. It was much easier to do that than to continue mediating between industrial capital and labour… OK, you are right in a sense: the industrial sector was suffering in places like Britain. So there was not much you could squeeze out of it. In Germany it wasn’t declining but it was still easier to turn a blind eye to what Deutsche Bank does and fund, through its super-profits (paper profits but nonetheless profits) part of the expansion of the social welfare system in Germany, than to keep pressing Siemens for greater transfers to the state and to wages.


Well the Third Way was all about redistribution instead of fiddling with wage levels and profit levels. 

Redistribution on the basis of what? On the basis of taxing the City. If you depend on tax from the City you cannot at the same time regulate the City. This is why I call it a Faustian bargain. You turn a blind eye to everything they were doing and then finance the NHS from a cut of this pyramidic pseudo-value production. The moment social democrats stopped playing the role of mediators between capital and labour, the moment they turned their back on the class struggle (which social democracy always accepted but tried to regulate) it was the end for social democracy. Because all it took was the 2008 implosion and suddenly, the same people that they were in bed with had all gone bankrupt.


So you’re saying the Third Way sowed the seeds of the current crisis of social democracy. 

The Third Way everywhere, not just Labour. And when those same bankers that (instead of industrial profits) were bankrolling the welfare state picked up the phone and said to Schröder, or to Blair or to Brown or whoever, “we need a few hundred billion or there will be no functioning ATMs tomorrow”, at that point the social democrats in power lacked both the analytical power to understand what was going on and the moral courage to oppose their bid to be bailed out along with their institutions. Their analytical power was “blown” the moment they bought all the rubbish about riskless risk and all that. Thus, when 2008 happened, they had no idea how that had happened. They had believed the rhetoric about boom and bust having been ended. And they lacked the moral authority to say to the bankers: “Sorry, you’re out. We’re salvaging the banks but not you.”

When you study the decline in support for social democrats across Europe, you notice the remarkable uniformity of that trend in a continent that still contains myriad sorts of capitalism ranging from the Nordic model to southern Europe. Why is that the case?
That’s financialisation for you.


It transcended borders?

It penetrated everything. It was like a colony of termites that had eaten the foundations from within.


So it undermined that social democratic formula. 

Yes, for example the social democratic model in Sweden was severely bruised after the banks there had gone crazy as well.


1994. 

Yes. In 1992-93 the Swedes, the Finns, dealt very well with the banking collapse. But then once they privatised them again, they set them free of proper regulation. And the wall of money that was coming from Wall Street, which was all being manufactured in the financialisation machine, was so large that these people had no resistance. The bankers themselves didn’t even know what was going on.


At the time of the crisis? 

No, before the crisis. Between 1993 and 2007. They had no idea. They just knew that all the other bankers around the world were making all this dough. And if they couldn’t show similar returns they were goners, their shareholders would have got rid of them. So they started mimicking. And I don’t believe they even knew what they were buying.


The Swedes?

The Swedes, Deutsche Bank, Societé Générale… I don’t think they understood what they were doing. Because they were not creating the stuff, they were just buying it. The people at Goldman Sachs always knew what they were doing, because they were manufacturing it. Their European “clients” did not have a clue.


Weren’t the ratings agencies the ones that were really in the dark? 

It’s one thing to be in the dark. It’s another to have your salary depend on you being in the dark.


Let me play devil’s advocate. The case for Blair, Schröder, even Persson in Sweden was: the right is in power in a way it has not been before (in Britain and Germany it had been almost hegemonic), we are in despair, the working class is fragmenting and the electorate is evolving in a more consumerist, more market-liberal direction. The party has to move with that. Notwithstanding what has happened since, is there any part of you that sympathises with that impetus in the 1990s to make what you call this “Faustian pact”? 

Look, I sympathise with Faust when I read Goethe, or even Marlowe for that matter. I completely sympathise with Faust. Don’t you? It’s a very compelling story. You can see things from his perspective. You can see why he was lured. So yes, I do. But this does not change anything: Faust erred badly.

I can see you there, in Auerbach’s Cellar, cheering Faust on. 

[Laughs] Look, take the Labour Party in Britain. And that’s self-criticism too because I was part of the demonstrations from 1978 to 1988. We were defending a model that was finished. We were defending coal-powered electricity generation. That wasn’t going to end well. Of course, that is not to say it was right to jettison hundreds of thousands of people—whole communities—without any period of transition to some other model. But we were fighting a losing battle. You have a point. People like Blair saw this. In that sense: yes, to that extent I’m sympathetic. Where I’m not sympathetic is where they lost sight of capitalism. The Left is supposed to be critical of capitalism. If it isn’t critical of capitalism it has no reason to exist. Why not be a Tory, a compassionate one-nation Tory, if you have no problem with capitalism? So they lost the capacity to be critical of capitalism. And being critical of capitalism does not mean saying that capitalism is a bad thing. Being critical of capitalism means being critical in the Marxist sense of looking at it as a system that produces crises and knowing that the greater the growth rate, the harder the fall around the corner. They had a duty to maintain this critical attitude towards capitalism while at the same time doing as you said: trying to find ways of escaping the defeatism of the Left, of embracing what Thatcher offered people. It’s against my aesthetic, but Thatcher offered them a vision of new vistas of pleasure and commercial endeavour. That we should take account of. You can’t say to people: it’s wrong to aspire to buying a new car, a new television set, a new computer or whatever. So yes, you should go along with this. But not lose sight of the fact that growth cannot be consistently fuelled by the proliferation of these financial products. It cannot be consistently fuelled by selling off council houses, by selling British Gas shares for a pittance to ensure that those who take the shares experience a 100% return the next day. At some point you “run out of other people’s money.”

Indeed… [Laughs]

[Laughs] Well, that’s also a criticism of liberalism, of neoliberalism.


To return to your point about that traditional social democratic demeanour towards capitalism, towards profit. Is it possible for that basic principle, in whatever evolved form, to coexist with globalisation?

That’s the trillion dollar question, isn’t it? Globalisation is not an exogenous force. It is not something that comes from Mars. It is what we allowed to happen on planet Earth. And in the same way that social democratic forces shaped the global financial system under Bretton Woods, they had a historic duty to shape what followed Bretton Woods, once Bretton Woods collapsed. But they didn't do that. They simply lost sight, firstly of the global financial system. They were far more interested in: “What can we do today to win the next election here?” Whereas the forces of neoliberalism had a global, almost Marxist perspective, an internationalist perspective which used to be typical of the Left.


A dialectical one!

A dialectical one. So no, I am not letting us off the hook by saying: “Oh, this was inevitable."


When you say “us”, you mean the Left? 

The Left, broadly defined. From Blair to anarchists. Syriza and Greece


Turning to the Greek situation, to what extent can we say that Syriza has moved into that space vacated by the collapse of Pasok? 

Completely.


Really?

Of course. [Laughs]


Were you surprised by that?

No. I wasn’t surprised. I was impressed but not surprised.


Impressed in what sense? 

Impressed that what I was predicting happened. Often what I predict doesn’t happen. [Both laugh] What I find interesting, from the Greek perspective was not so much the January [2015] election that brought us to power. That was expected. PASOK had been so totally delegitimised. I joined PASOK as a very young person in 1974-5, when it was first inaugurated by Andreas Papandreou. It was a very radical party. Papandreou’s thinking back then was very impressive.


Really? You helped put his party out of business. 

You’ve got to remember that Papandreou [senior] was an excellent mathematical economist. He was head of the department at Berkeley University (not to be scoffed at). He mathematised economics with Kenneth Arrow and others in the 1950s. He wasn’t radical back then. He became radical because of the Greek experience here, seeing how the CIA was manipulating politics here. Now, in the early 1970s he brought to Greece a very interesting mixture of good quality economic thinking—Nobel-prize winning levels of economic thinking—with an anti-colonial mentality. A kind of Gandhi narrative against Empire, where Greece was also part of the colonial periphery of the Empire.


A forerunner of the Latin American “pink wave” in some respects. 

Yes, indeed. So many of us had joined PASOK back then, on that basis. It was a clean party, because it was new and it wasn’t corrupt. And then it became exactly the opposite. It became completely “establishment”, dirty, and subservient to the colonial logic of the Troika. So it was only a matter of time before the people who had joined it—people like my parents, for example, who joined it with enthusiasm—would abandon it for something like Syriza which was reclaiming the ground that PASOK had forfeited.


You’re talking about the post-crisis period. 

Between 2011 and 2015. When the party went from 4% to 40%. A magnificent rise. And now it’s going to go back down to 4%, the way it’s going.


You think?

Oh yes. There’s no doubt about that.


It’s behind New Democracy, but… 

It will collapse. It’s a new PASOK. And it’s going down that way. I don’t know what will replace it but it has no future. The referendum [on the EU bailout offer in July 2015] was unique in Greek history, and in European history. Why? I’m not going to go into the issues, but will only refer to the social-class composition of the vote. Usually the working class is divided between conservatives, social democrats, communists and so on. So you have working-class Tories, social-democratic working class people and you have the Left. The 62% No vote at the referendum consisted of the under-privileged Greeks across party lines. Poor Greeks that may normally vote for New Democracy voted No. And a considerable number of bourgeois leftists, with money in the closed banks, voted Yes. This is something impossible to fathom if you don’t live here. I noticed that some of my MPs who were quite well to do voted Yes. And New Democracy supporters who have nothing to lose voted No. The working-class New Democracy voters did not go with their leadership. And well to-do, bourgeois Syriza voters voted Yes.


Is that so unexpected? Those who have less to lose are more radical. 

Sure, it all boils down to: do you have money in the bank? If you have a lot and you think that No means you will never get it out, you vote for Yes. But I wasn’t expecting such an alignment around self-interest. Because it doesn’t happen nowadays.


It’s Thatcherism in reverse. Thatcher’s priority was to give people capital—the “property owning democracy”—to give them a stake in the status quo. 

Maybe it’s exactly the same. But it wasn’t capital, it was bank deposits. I was just struck by that: that there were Syriza supporters who live near here, in very nice penthouses, who voted Yes.


But presumably in Piraeus the Syriza supporters backed No. 

Absolutely. Actually the No side won every constituency in Greece; the first time that there was such uniformity.


That begs the question: isn’t Syriza’s fate the fate of every party that tries to bend the rules of globalisation? 

Oh no, that’s not why Syriza is collapsing. The reason why Syriza is collapsing is because it has been co-opted to an unworkable fiscal policy. Greece went bankrupt in 2010 and we have had a “pretend and extend” programme since then. So it is just like a company that has totally failed and is given another loan by a banker who feels that if he declares the bankruptcy his books will be in trouble, so keeps extending loans and pretends that the loan is performing. That’s Greece, with our creditors (the infamous Troika) in the role of rogue banker. Any government that adopts this stance and is co-opted in this project fails and disappears from the political map. And this is what it is. It has nothing to do with globalisation. It is Europe remaining in denial about the bankruptcy of the Greek state and the inability of the Eurozone to function according to rules that were not up to standard.


What would a different path have looked like? 

Well, what we tried to do. To say this: we’re not playing games, this is what we are proposing. It’s very moderate and we are open to discussing the details. The basis of our position is that we will not have any more fiscal deficits but our primary surplus will be modest, at around 1%. Forget the surplus targets of 3.5% and 4.5% of GDP. These are simply impossible. And if you declare that this is your target nobody will invest in this country because they interpret such targets as a signal that you’re going to tax them through the nose. The problem in Greece is investment. The only way to recover is investment and everything beyond a 1% primary surplus target is inconsistent with recovery. So we’re not going to sign on the dotted line any agreement which involves 3-3.5% primary surpluses. It’s very simple. And in order to make our debt sustainable with only 1% we want a debt restructure that is based on simple financial engineering, no haircuts or anything like that are necessary. We even told them what needs to be done in a way which Wall Street functionaries understand and with which they agree. And then let’s come to an agreement on the question of reforms. Instead of hitting small-time pharmacists and pensioners, let’s hit the oligarchy, where we really need reform. So that is what I went to Brussels with: “This is it. Take it or leave it. If you want to crush us, crush us.”


But you are saying it wasn’t Brussels, it was choices made by legislators and leaders in Athens. 

No, that was 2010. We were elected in 2015. We could have changed all that. We could have gone—and I did go—to the Eurogroup and said just that: “Help us reform Greece, but to reform Greece we need to stop the debt-deflationary cycle. And to stop that we need targets which are reachable, credible and which do not deter investment. Within that everything is negotiable.” But they didn’t want that. They didn’t even want to consider this possibility. Because, for them, the recovery of Greece was not the issue. The issue was not to give a signal to the Spanish, the Irish, the Portuguese that a government can be elected which goes to them with ideas of its own. My idea was to stand our ground and make it public that we were flexible and reasonable. (This is not a left-wing agenda, this is what any sensible policy-maker would recommend and was not far from what the IMF was saying; there were moments when the IMF was saying things more radical than me, but then for political reasons [Christine] Lagarde, to maintain her relations with Schäuble, went back on it.) You want to throw us out of the euro zone? Do it. I’m not leaving the euro zone. You throw me out. You have no way of doing it, except by violating the rules of the EU. Good. Be my guest. That was what I was elected to say. That was why I was so desperately disliked in Brussels. But if we had done that and stood our ground, that would have had a €1 trillion cost. I don’t believe Draghi would have been able to keep things calm; not only because €1 trillion is a lot of money but because his QE would have been wrecked. Because if we had restructured the €27 billion that we owed the ECB, Jens Weidmann [the President of the Bundesbank] would have attacked him on the basis of: “See, you purchase government paper? A chunk of it defaulted or was restructured. And therefore you have violated the charter of the ECB which prohibits any public debt financing.” This is why I stand convinced that Draghi would have never done this, if we remained resolute.


Because they would have had to pull QE?

Yes, and the Euro would be finished. So I think we had good leverage. But I was not allowed to use it.


That brings me back to my point: that the fault lies with those in your former party, in Athens. 

Not even my party. Just three or four people in the inner cabinet.


What motives possessed them? 

Really, I don’t know. I dislike interpreting other people’s motives. I had not seen it coming. If I had I would not have entered government. I watched it happen in front of me. The banal explanation is fear and a relative ignorance of basic economics. There were some people there who thought, like the previous government: “we can go to a 3.5% primary surplus; it’s not going to kill us if we grant this, that and the other.” If this was their genuine thinking, they were badly mistaken. You announce that silly surplus target, investment doesn’t happen and then you’re dead in the water. As we are now.


On Spain


You have links with Podemos in Spain. They are saying no to government options with PSOE and Ciudadanos. Do you think that’s the right move? 

Yes. Look, government is a chore. And all good people should see office as a chore. If you crave to be in office, you are dangerous. We should all be reluctant ministers. So why should you do it? You should do it only if you think you can change something for the better. If, even before you enter the ministry, you have to accept policies you know don’t work, what is the point? And also, it is a terrible thing for democracy. Imagine if Pablo Iglesias [the leader of Podemos] entered office tomorrow and implemented the same policies as before. Why was there a change of government? Why did the people make the courageous choice of jettisoning the previous government? If people change governments but policy remains the same, and is equally ineffective, this undermines the democratic process.


On Germany


Is that a problem more broadly? Is it the case that the SPD in Germany is just too indistinguishable from the CDU? 

The SPD, under its current leadership, is much worse than the CDU. Much worse. I’d much rather deal with Merkel and Schäuble than the SPD’s leaders.


They have been quite obstructive on the migrant question.

They have been appalling. I grew up in awe of the SPD, because we lived in a dictatorship here in Greece and Willy Brandt was a great supporter of Greek democrats. The SPD showed immense leadership. For me, the SPD is part of my milieu. When I saw them and I met the dearth of honesty, the lack of ideas, the 19th century shenanigans that they were engaged in…


19th century in what way?

(19th century as in power relations rather than political relations.) …their manipulation, their twisting of what you said. Whereas with Schäuble, compared with my dealings with the SPD, I knew what I was dealing with. And I also had interesting conversations with him. I could not have had an interesting conversation with [Sigmar] Gabriel. So you can see the decrepitude of the social democratic tradition. They are the least interesting, the least innovative, the least sincere of the whole political spectrum.


Why?

They sold themselves to Mephisto, and then at some point even he didn’t care for them.


It seems astonishing that a political family with such an heritage, with so many clever people on board, could accept its defeat.

Yes. But there is something else which went along with that. The same process of financialisation that depleted the analytical and moral authority of the social democrats was precisely the process that diminished the value of political goods more generally and turned talented people away from politics.


Because you could achieve less from a position of power. 

Yes. If Harold Wilson was an 18-year-old today, he probably wouldn’t want to go into politics. If Willy Brandt was an 18-year-old today, he wouldn’t want to go into politics. And this is why politicians aren’t what they used to be. It’s not because our DNA is degenerating. It’s that there is a natural Darwinian process, a natural selection process. Politics attracts the least well-meaning and least talented people because the political sphere has been devalued.


On the Labour Party


It has been in the news that you are helping the Labour Party. What can you say about what you are working on with them? Or is it under the hat? 

It isn’t under the hat. I believe in full transparency! I have had a number of conversations with them and I think it is fair to say my engagement with the Labour Party concentrates on two issues. Firstly investment. And secondly Brexit. Now, my view—not just about Britain but about the whole of Europe—is that investment is the key. We have a major discrepancy between savings and investment.


Especially in Britain. 

Even in Germany. Germany has the lowest level of investment since 1945. This is absurd, given that they have negative interest rates. It actually reveals the depth of the deflationary spiral in which we are. Same in Britain, France, Spain. Here [in Greece] we have negative investment, and we don’t have negative savings so the excess of savings over investment is proportionately huge. So my advice to the Labour Party is: don’t focus on austerity. Austerity is the symptom. What matters is the low level of investment. And if the Labour Party is going to push ahead and escape this constant bickering between Blairites and Corbynistas, escape the trap set up for it by the toxic right-wing press, escape the attempt by the BBC to play on the divisions within the Labour Party, my message to them is: you have to do what Harold Wilson did in the 1960s, which is to recast the Labour Party as the political force behind renewal through investment in modern technologies. Back then it was the “white head of technology”. Now it should be the “cool breeze of sustainable technology”. And this should be the mantra. Because if that investment happens, the whole austerity debate becomes secondary. At the moment Osborne is caught in a trap of his own making. With every week that goes by the rising PSBR [public sector borrowing requirement] is a problem because the tax take is always lower due to greater cuts. And he has nothing to say about that. Labour should say something about that. And it shouldn’t simply say to the Brits: we will tax and spend more. Because this doesn’t wash. You’ve got to talk about how to crowd in private investment through a public investment bank which operates like the European Investment Bank, like the World Bank; that is, at arm’s length from government and whose purpose is not to tax in order to spend, but to issue bonds that are assisted through QE (I had a piece in The Economist about this some time ago, about how QE could be utilised to keep the yields of a public investment bank low) in order to mop up savings and hand them over to private sector firms; to start ups, this that and the other. So this is one thing I’m discussing with Labour: investment. No-one can accuse me of being an austerian. But I say: “austerity is a boring issue, don’t keep telling people you are anti-austerity”.


On Brexit


It really killed them in the last parliament, even though they weren’t that anti-austerity.

Yes. Talk about something positive. Investment. On Brexit, I lament the fact that the Labour Party is not leading the debate. It has been cornered. The main debate now is between different factions of the Tory Party (and they are both wrong). For me the great calamity is that the more intellectually interesting and solid view comes out of the Brexiters. They have a Burkean argument about sovereignty (with which I disagree, but nevertheless is philosophically interesting). Cameron has nothing to say of any interest whatsoever. He brought the worst kind of fudge back from Brussels and is simply banking on fear and small-c conservatism: no change because change is dangerous. This is not a reason to be in the European Union. We at DiEM25, the Democracy in Europe Movement, are planning an event in May, a month before the election in Britain, to bring together people who would not otherwise come together; from the Labour Party, Caroline Lucas and the Green Party, the Scottish National Party, people who are not party-aligned, to argue the radical case for staying, which is: Britain needs to reclaim its democracy and to do this it must stay in Brussels and fight for the democratisation of Europe. Because you can’t say you’re going to stay in the Single Market and opt out of the European Union. That way you are effectively forfeiting even what you have left in terms of sovereignty to an alien power. So we are going to be working on this. And what DiEM25 can offer the Labour Party, the Greens and other progressives in Britain is an answer to a pressing question. I was in the House of Commons recently and I heard MPs tell me: “Our constituents are writing to us that they hate the EU, that they want to get out. They asked us: Why are you recommending that we stay?” And: “Look at what happened to the Greeks—shouldn’t we get out?” Now, no one can accuse me of being an austerian or being pro-EU. So when it comes from me that Britain should stay and join forces with us within the European Union, that carries some weight among a certain section of the British political scene.


On DiEM25


Nixon goes to China. That brings me on to what you call the “movement”. I have read the manifesto. What does the practical plan for the next year look like? You’ve set yourself these milestones; how do you get there? 

The first one [happened] on March 21st to 23rd in Rome, on transparency. The second one will be in Barcelona on the EU constitution and the process we are proposing. There will be an event in London on sovereignty. But primarily we will stage six large “assemblies”, beginning with transparency, then moving onto investment, migration, currency, monetary policies and so on. It will take 18-24 months for all six to convene. These are our markers in the calendar and before each Assembly —this is our ambition—there will be hundreds of small town hall meetings in the run-up to each. The purpose is to produce a white paper for each one of these six pivotal issues. If that works, and we have this sequence of town hall meetings culminating in large Assemblies where a substantial policy paper is approved, then within 18-24 months we will have a fully fledged Programme for Europe, a European Agenda. This is the conversation we want to have and the consensus we want to come up with. And if we do that, and if this consensus is interesting, then this consensus will find a way of expressing itself.


Will you be working with political parties? 

We are already doing so. But we do not co-opt political parties. We do not say: the Labour Party is part of DiEM25. Anybody from the Labour Party who wants to be part of this process can come and have this conversation, without co-opting the whole party. Because there are people in the Labour Party that are not even Europeanists. Same with Die Linke. Die Linke is split between those who are with us and those who want return to the Deutschmark, for instance.


And the idea is that this programme will provide a touchstone for campaigners and politicians?

We don’t know yet. My hope is that this consensus is powerful enough and revitalises the conversation in Europe, then it could even find electoral expression and could even stand for European Parliament or local government elections or in association with parties that adopt this programme, this consensus. But this is completely open-ended. As Brian Eno said in Berlin: “Start cooking, recipe to follow!”


You have some big names on board. Zizek?

Zizek is a great supporter, indeed an active DiEM25 member. In Berlin we had a video message from Zizek rather than Zizek himself. As Eno said, it was the shortest speech he had ever heard Slavoj give!


On the future of social democracy


Returning to where we started, do you think social democracy has a future? Has it run its course? Or is it just that “social democrats” by name have run their course. 

The truth is, I don’t know. “Social democracy” as a label is finished, because it has been tainted. Just like “communist”. Communism died in 1991 because it was associated with a particular manifestation which killed off an original idea, from back in 1848, that I think was good. Similarly “social democracy” has been too tainted as a term. But I also do believe that social democracy is very 20th century. Now, what we are facing is a major technological upheaval within global capitalism, in which the old-fashioned way of thinking about capital and labour and their tussle - which is central to social democracy, or ought to be if it is to be revived - is becoming disrupted, as they say, by the third or fourth machine age. Very soon we are going to have to be thinking in different terms. And as Gramsci used to say, “the old is dying but the new is struggling to be born.”


We’re in an “interregnum”, then? 

Yes. Which is always a very dangerous period.


Of course we do not know exactly what the impetus for government and politicians will be in the coming years but what do you think this shift means for how the compassionate state should look in 50 to 100 years? 

Look, it’s not a question so much of “compassionate” as one of a state capable of regulating social conflicts. Because that is what the state always did, beginning with Magna Carta. It was all about regulating conflicts between the barons and the King and the merchants and the trades unions and so forth. Today we are facing a serious danger of large masses of people who have low economic value. This is a powder keg in the foundations of society. Making sure that the great wealth-creation which capital is capable of does not light this dynamite—the basic income approach—is absolutely essential, but it is not part of the social democratic tradition. Think about it. The post-war consensus was all about national insurance, it was not about basic income. Now, either we are going to have a basic income that regulates this new society of ours, or we are going to have very substantial social conflicts that get far worse with xenophobia and refugees and migration and so forth. But I do not think that social democracy has the analytical skills to come to terms with this. Even Keynes…


He was a liberal.

The working class was one lump for him, and consumption was one thing. Now we have gradations, different qualities, lots of conflicts and possibilities that emanate from this multi-layered, multi-dimensional evolution of the old categories. And I don’t think social democracy is up to this. I don’t know what is.


It used to be a lot easier to pull together a sufficiently large coalition of voters to win an election, when you had clear class distinctions. You could add one to one and make two quite easily, whereas now the arithmetic has got a lot more complicated. The question is: what sort of political force has the right “glue” to build a coalition on the scale needed?

That’s right. Mind you, it was large minorities that ruled.


But 20 years ago it was parties like Labour, the SPD getting 40% where now they get 20%. It changes the character of the political family. 

I am still under the influence of last year, when we had a 75% approval rating. So I cannot agree it is impossible. We didn’t put out a very radical package. Hope is what is in deficit. Britain, the British public, has no hope. When they voted for Cameron last year it was not hopefully. It was reluctantly and because they did not like Ed [Miliband] and they did not trust the Labour Party. Now they will vote to stay in Europe out of fear, not out of hope. So what do we need to do to capture hope? That is the issue. In the 50s and 60s the dream of shared prosperity was that which gave hope. Even the Tories latched onto it: Ted Heath, the one nation Tories and so on. So I think the basic income approach is capable of doing this as long as (and this is what I emphasise when I talk to the Corbynistas) you can explain to them where the money will come from, that it will not be simply debt, that we are going to generate a lot more income and a chunk of it is going to fund this. But we, the Left, must not be fearful. I gave a talk some time ago in the United States and said: yes, surfers in California must be fed by the rest of us. We may not like that, we may feel they are bums, but they deserve a basic income too.

[Laughs]

OK, they don’t “deserve”, but they should have a basic income, because this is the way to stabilise society. But you need politicians that are capable of going out there and saying: “You see that lazy bum over there that you hate? We should feed him. And we should make sure he has a house. Because if he does not have a house and he gets sick and so on, he is a greater burden for all of us. And if there are lots of them and technological innovation produces a lot more of them, that would be macro-economically unsustainable. Those of us who want to work—because we enjoy it and have the opportunity—have the technology to produce so much wealth that we can feed the surfers.” But who says that?


That can be your slogan: “feed the surfers”. Yanis Varoufakis, thank you. 

Thank you.