The Skripal affair: a counter view

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

IF one were to anchor a TV programme with the archival revelation that it was Benazir Bhutto who introduced Theresa May’s husband to the future British prime minister at an Oxford reunion ball in 1976, many of us would perhaps happily spend a lot of our precious time glued to the looped and re-looped discussion.

On the other hand, if one were to ask whether Prime Minister May posed a bigger threat to a stable world order than does President Donald Trump it would likely pass for a precipitous canard. This despite that fact that we are ever so often cautioned about the rear view mirror in the car: the objects one sees may be closer at heel than they appear. The warning can be easily applied to international politics.

What we see, or believe we are seeing, can be different from what is afoot. What seems distant or remote could be the trigger for what passes for domestic turbulence. Astute social scientists call it dialectics, whereby everything in the world can be connected with everything else.

Take the poisoning of the double agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury or consider the latest chemical attack near Damascus in the rebel-held region of Douma. There are legitimate ways of seeing a link between the two. But the way the avenues of news and information have been dumbed down, it would be a challenge to engage an average citizen in a discussion on what to them would be a distant blip on their mirror, if not an imagination of a foggy mind.

So let us quickly come to the facts at hand, and we can crosscheck them too. It is a fact, after all, as distinct from false news, that Trump was elected US president in November 2016. Wasn’t he? Then his election was soon declared to be the handiwork of Russian agents. Right?

Indeed, Trump continued to annoy the deep state. He wanted to befriend Vladimir Putin and questioned the purpose of Nato. He went a step further. He began to question intelligence reports passed to him or leaked to the public.

Then came Theresa May to the rescue of the deep state with its roots on both sides of the Atlantic. When Trump in his pre-political avatar was misbehaving with women, May was already her country’s home secretary. She held that position from 2010 until she was elevated to lead her party and country in July 2016.

Her tenure as home secretary saw the destruction of Libya and the savage assault on Syria. Even more importantly, she was in the cockpit when the Crimea crisis erupted. And she had a good view of it even if she may have been privately appalled at the less than robust response that Nato was willing to offer Russia.

When she became the first foreign leader to visit President Trump on Jan 26 last year, Ms May was nursing another headache on the tour. And so her round trip to the White House included an equally vital stopover in Turkey on the way back. Leaders of both countries on her itinerary were allies of Nato and both were veering perilously close to Vladimir Putin. In a jiffy, she saw the centuries-old British policy of garrotting Russia slipping under her feet.

The mirror on the driver’s side may be telling us to watch out for Donald Trump, who everyone, including most Americans, agrees is speeding ahead rather recklessly on an uncharted trajectory. The mirror on the other side though is showing us a blip, and in a lane where it shouldn’t be. As far as the naked eye can see, the more threatening blip looks like Theresa May. Stated bluntly, Trump may be a decoy.

Double agent Sergei Skripal was swapped by Russia with the US in 2010 and sent for safekeeping to UK. There are some questions about his illness the Russians have asked, including the question: what purpose could it serve to bump off a used- up Russian double agent on the eve of a presidential election, or just ahead of the World Cup that Russia will be hosting? There can be a legitimate suspicion that Skripal and, unwittingly, his daughter fell victim to a strike by someone whose cover Skripal had blown.

But we could also ask, on the other hand, whether it is impossible for another country to replicate the poison that one country has manufactured. The question holds the key when the other side claims to know what that poison is. In other words they have the substance or can produce it to develop an antidote or, why not, to keep it in store for a useful false flag attack. This is not how it happened. This is how some questions come to mind.

A poor scientist died of smallpox in England, after all, when a laboratory accidently released the virus in 1978. The cause of Janet Parker’s infection sent shockwaves through the medical profession. It was reportedly accepted at the time that the virus had travelled through an air duct connecting a smallpox lab with Janet’s office directly above.

To assert that both attacks — in Salisbury and in Douma — can be blamed on Russia, is to state the obvious. A more involved discussion could look at the rise of John Bolton as the new national security adviser to Trump. He has advocated war with Iran, and the alleged Syrian chemical attack may tie up with that objective, as a ruse.

But why has Trump changed his tune on Russia? Has the deep state got the goods on him, in a manner of speaking? If so, Theresa May should have a better grip on the narrative. It was a former British agent in Moscow, after all, whose report is said to have brought the president of the United States to his senses, if that is the word.

Subramanian Swamy on His New Book 'The Ideology of India's Modern Right'

Pakistan: For whom the bell tolls?

Najam Sethi in The Friday Times

The bell has begun to toll. Most people think it is tolling for the general elections. Although these are constitutionally scheduled to be held no later than September 2018, there are apprehensions these could be delayed. The bell could also be tolling for the House of Sharif, particularly Nawaz Sharif. Most people are convinced that the scales of justice are weighted against him. What are the odds, and consequences, of the tolling of the bell?

The Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP) has received over 2000 petitions against constituency delimitations. It has two months in which to appraise and redress them before the national and provincial parliaments are dissolved and electioneering begins in earnest. It is also certain that most decisions of the ECP will be challenged in the High Courts because constituency revisions are critically impacting the fate of traditional candidates. Some may even appeal to the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP). Unless some swift solutions are found by the ECP and courts, God alone knows how this matter will be resolved without postponing elections.

Then there is the matter of caretaker governments. Finding consensus candidates in Balochistan and Sindh should not be difficult because the major players there are openly aligned with the powerful Miltablishment that calls the shots. But Islamabad, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa will be less soluble and the ECP may have to step in to clear the decks. There will be unsavoury controversy, conspiracies are bound to be imputed and the electoral waters will be muddied. To top it all, scores of candidates are likely to clutch at Constitutional Articles 62 and 63 or Iqama-type inconsistencies to challenge their opponents’ nomination papers.

The fate of Nawaz Sharif’s accountability trial will also impinge on elections. If he is knocked out, the PMLN will have to consider whether to boycott elections or go down fighting with one hand tied behind its back. In the immediate aftermath, there are bound to be defections from the PMLN. Their significance will depend on how successfully Nawaz Sharif can reinforce his perception as the victim of injustice, who is turning to the people for salvation. So far, going by the big crowds he is drawing to his jalsas in comparison with the rather indifferent showing of his political opponents, he is not doing badly. But the mood of his detractors is turning ugly, a sign of what lies ahead.

The Geo/Jang Group that is propping up the Sharifs’ narrative is for the chop. “Invisible” forces have leaned on cable operators across large swathes of the country, to shut down all the group’s channels. PEMRA is helpless in redressing their complaints. They are losing money because their ads are trailing off and have therefore delayed salaries to their employees. But the Supreme Court has ordered them to “beg or borrow” and cough up. The court accuses them of receiving the largest chunk of public sector ads because of their pro-government stance but is silent in the face of their higher ranking and ratings that attract these ads even from the private sector on commercial merit. Now Saleem Safi, a top GEO journalist, who continues to ask awkward questions about the direction in which Pakistan is being herded, has been targeted – some “invisible” goons attacked his home and beat up his guard for resisting them. And so it goes on.

We are told that any talk of a judicial martial law in the offing, is hogwash. This is reassuring. But one cannot help but compare today’s situation to what transpired in December 1997 when the then CJP, Sajjad Ali Shah, wrote to the then army chief for backing against, and protection from, the government of the day. The CJP’s order was not carried out. It was forwarded to the Defense Ministry on the plea that GHQ answers to it rather than to the SC. Today, we are informed, if any order is passed by the CJP, the army “will not remain in barracks” if it is resisted by the government or parliament.

In fact, an unprecedented alignment of political forces is now grouping to “reform the country”. The original child of the Miltablishment, Nawaz Sharif, has become a dangerous outcast. The original bête noir of the Miltablishment, Asif Zardari, has become its blue-eyed boy. The judiciary, which has historically been the handmaiden of the executive arm of government, has suddenly become “independent” with the backing of the Miltablishment even though its “independence” was won from the same Miltablishment not so long ago with the struggle of the Lawyers Movement and democratic political forces. And the media that fought to win its independence from the Miltablishment a decade ago has suddenly acquiesced in its favour without a whimper.

Under the circumstances, we are right to wonder for whom the bell tolls.

Elected representatives will do the right thing on Brexit

Nick Clegg in The Financial Times


Like the suspense in an old-fashioned cowboy film before the final gunfight, tension in Westminster is already rising as MPs prepare for the “meaningful” vote on Brexit towards the end of this year. The upcoming debates in the House of Commons will be the political equivalent of scuffles in a saloon, harbingers of the real showdown to come. 

Many MPs — the majority of whom would probably slip the noose of Brexit if only they knew how — are still waiting, hoping, that something might turn up. Perhaps public opinion will shift decisively against Brexit before the vote? Maybe the economic damage will suddenly become more obvious? Or could the gory details of the Brexit deal itself prompt people to think again? 

The truth, alas, is much harsher. Public opinion has shifted a little in favour of the Remain camp, and a lot towards wider concern about the impact of Brexit on the NHS and the economy. But it remains firmly enveloped in an indifference towards the details of the negotiations, and a sullen belief that politicians should just “get on with it”. Advertising campaigns by anti-Brexit groups will not, on their own, shift opinion in a big way. 

Equally, while there are abundant signs that Brexit has already had a chilling effect on economic growth, it has not (yet) done so in a dramatic enough fashion to force a rethink. And those who hope for a level of unforgiving detail in the Brexit deal will hope in vain: there is a shared interest between David Davis and Michel Barnier not to scare the horses, either in Westminster or the European Parliament, before the definitive votes this winter. They both want a deal, and both are happy to delay the really tricky choices about the future EU-UK relationship until after parliamentarians can do anything about it. 

So MPs will have nowhere to hide. They are unlikely to be rescued by last minute developments. They will be left alone with their own consciences. And this is exactly as it should be: the vote on the government’s Brexit deal will be like no other in recent history, touching on every vital economic, security and constitutional feature of our country. That is why John Major was right to call for a free vote for MPs, and to suggest that, in the absence of an unwhipped vote, MPs should put the final deal to another vote of the people instead. 

As MPs limber up to make their choice, they can at least be sure of one thing: all of the reasons which (they will be told) oblige them to support the deal will be false. Some newspapers will screech that a vote against the deal is a vote to put Jeremy Corbyn into Downing Street, when in truth the Fixed Term Parliament Act protects the government from an instant election. 

Commentators will opine that without a deal the UK will crash out of the EU on March 29 next year, when it is obvious that the EU27 would give the UK more time. And the repeated allegation that a vote to withhold parliamentary consent would “defy the will of the people” ignores the fact that the version of Brexit presented to MPs will be utterly different to the version promised to voters, and that the world has changed dramatically since 2016. 

The notion, for instance, that MPs should not be allowed to take into account America’s lurch to protectionism under President Donald Trump when assessing the best way forward is absurd. One of the greatest hallmarks of a healthy democracy, as opposed to rigid ideological regimes, is an ability to adapt in the face of changing circumstances. Democracies self-correct in a way which theocracies and authoritarian systems cannot. To deny MPs the right to make such judgments is an abrogation of democracy. 

In the end, it comes down to a judgment by our elected representatives to do what they believe to be best for those they serve. Given the universal cynicism with which politicians are viewed, my hunch is that this is one bit of the Brexit jigsaw which is too readily overlooked. In the end, most MPs, most of the time, want to do the right thing.

How I Got Over That Dark Geographic Shadow Called Pakistan

Qudsiya Ahmed in The Wire


“Musalman ke do hi sthaan, qabristan ya Pakistan” (A Muslim has only two choices of abode – graveyard or Pakistan) is not a rhyme that a nine-year-old forgets with time. Its memory becomes stronger with age, as does the intensity of this choice. What hits her first is the option available; followed by the realisation of what is at stake — her life, and her loyalty to the country.

I have nothing to do with Pakistan. We do have family members who migrated during Partition, but I haven’t ever seen them — I have grown up abhorring all distant connections that I may have with a country which is neighbourhood for India, but for Muslims in India, is a dark geographic shadow that has chased them in the last seven decades; any allegiance to it makes them fail the litmus test of nationalism, and even today is thrown at them as their ‘natural place’.

I grew up as a very ‘conscious’ Muslim; not for my faith, but what this faith was associated with. In the mid-80s and early 90s, when my friends and classmates were fascinated with Pakistan’s fast bowlers, I couldn’t afford to ‘like’ them. I have vivid memories of 1992 when the Imran Khan-led Pakistan cricket team won the World Cup. It must have been a joyous and historic moment for their nation, but I hated that celebration — the visuals of the team bowing to the field in jubilation — because I was subjected to suspicious questioning by my Hindu Punjabi neighbours about my parents’ response to this victory, wondering if we also quietly celebrated this in our house.

An advertising poster for a film outside a movie theatre in Karachi, Pakistan. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro/Files

Pakistan became an enemy that came between my friends and me occasionally, and between my country and me often. My yearning for acceptance of my loyalty as an Indian was strong, even though it came at the cost of irrationally bashing ‘Pakistan’ for its cricket and its politics, and anything that kept me on ‘the side of my people’ was acceptable to me.

So, Pakistan, with which I had maintained a safe distance growing up, came close, uncomfortably close, when my husband had to travel to Pakistan for his journalistic pursuits. It was almost an irritation when my father had to go to the Pakistan High Commission to fetch my husband’s visa in his absence.

My work got me in touch with Pakistani academics and researchers, and that is when I began to know Pakistan as its people. I found a window into their research, courses, and universities, daily email exchange and communication grew, and very soon my Facebook profile could list at least a hundred ‘friends’ in Pakistan. In early 2017, as my son recovered from a major heart surgery at Jaypee Hospital, I learnt of a family who had traveled from Pakistan for their son’s surgery. Our children were in the same ICU, fighting bravely for life, and outside, their Indian and Pakistani mothers shared their grief and bonded over the pain that they were going through. After three months of tough fight, the Pakistani boy passed away, and I remember his inconsolable mother as she cried in disbelief at her misfortune and the futility of her struggle. The little hope and courage that I would gather every day to see my son for two minutes every morning in the ICU seemed ruptured, and I could feel her pain. I hugged her, as this was the only solace that I could offer to another mother, who happened to be a Pakistani.

A few days ago, I was at the Chaophraya Emerging Leaders’ Dialogue in Bangkok. A first of its kind in a nine-year-old Track Two dialogue between India and Pakistan, the dialogue brought together mid-career professionals who represented the next generation of leadership across industry and scholarship from both countries.

I suppose that this is the closest that I have come to Pakistan, a country that makes my position in my home country extremely vulnerable. And here I was representing India in an exchange of ideas for peaceful and productive bilateral talk between the two countries, on how they could coincide their actions to face shared challenges of climate change, extremism, and terrorism, and utilise the new media for mutual benefit. One of the most vibrant panels in the programme was on the role that women can play in foreign policy. All of us had something to contribute, and the room resonated with experiences and daily struggles that felt familiar and emphasised the similarity of everyday lives on both sides.

I can claim to know the ‘people’ side of Pakistan now, which is as humble, passionate, and desirous of amity as are the people in India. They are also progressive, articulate, and ambitious, as are my people.

I can appreciate them for what they are without the fear of being abused and demonised for this. I have come of age. But not all Indian Muslims who are subjected to verbal abuse and violent attacks and are repeatedly asked to ‘go to Pakistan’ will have the opportunity of mental healing. School-going Muslim children, who are derogatorily called ‘Pakistani’ by their classmates, will grow up as vulnerable and marginalised adults. No cricket enthusiast will ever be able to appreciate cricket for the spirit of the game, and no one will offer a hand of friendship.

So next time, when some Vinay Katiyar (founder of Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s youth wing, Bajrang Dal) asks Indian Muslims to go to Pakistan, we should be able to tell him: I belong to India, it is my homeland, and Pakistanis are friends.

Britain sees the Commonwealth as its trading empire. It is sadly deluded

Nearly every Commonwealth country opposed Brexit. Leavers are wrong to hope old imperial patterns will replace EU trade


 Ian Jack in The Guardian

 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon


Early April, 2018. In Brisbane a cheeky radio interviewer asks Prince Charles if he really does carry a personal lavatory seat on his travels, and the prince replies, “Oh, don’t believe all that crap.” Elsewhere in the Queensland capital, India win gold in the women’s weightlifting and lose to Cameroon in the men’s basketball. At Buckingham Palace, a menu is drawn up for a banquet to be attended later this month by 53 heads of state or their representatives. In Whitehall, the Department for International Trade ponders the effects on British farming of hormone-treated beef imports from Australia, which is a probable consequence of the UK’s first post-Brexit trade deal.

In one way or another, the Commonwealth is responsible for all these things: for the Commonwealth Games, which demand the presence of the heir to the throne in Australia; for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting (Chogm), the 25th such conclave since 1971, which occurs in London (and Windsor Castle) on 16-20 April; and, simply by its dogged and unlikely persistence as an international grouping, for permitting the British delusion that old imperial patterns of trade can replace the present arrangements with the EU. (Enter the hormone-treated beef.)

Not that the Commonwealth itself encouraged this idea: nearly every Commonwealth republic and “realm” wanted the UK to remain inside the EU. And not that Europhobes have always prized the Commonwealth. As our present foreign secretary wrote in 2002, “It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies.” The Commonwealth that some Brexit campaigners had in mind was perhaps a little whiter – taking the definition of Commonwealth all the way back to the time when it meant the British empire’s settler dominions: Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland and South Africa, which were sovereign states, not colonies, and bound only by their loyalty to the crown.

Indian independence forced Britain to be more flexible about who could be included. As India would be a republic, loyal oaths were out of the question. But Britain was keen to maintain some form of the old connection “in the mistaken belief”, according to the Commonwealth historian Philip Murphy, “that India’s huge standing army would continue to underwrite British great-power status”. There were other reasons too. Historic sentiment, fear of American ambition, the need to protect British markets: together they led Britain to propose a compromise. All that would be required was that India recognise the king as the head of the Commonwealth, “as the symbol of the free association of its independent member states”, rather than pledging loyalty to him. Even so, the offer still flew in the face of the complete withdrawal that had been promised by leaders of the independence movement. But India’s prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, finally went along with it – realising, he said, that Commonwealth membership meant “independence plus, not independence minus”.

Other countries felt the same. In his forthcoming book, The Empire’s New Clothes: the Myth of the Commonwealth, Murphy argues that Britain didn’t mastermind the growth of the modern Commonwealth as part of a grand geopolitical strategy. Newly independent colonies wanted to belong, not least because their anticolonial leaders still felt a strong sense of cultural attachment to Britain and the British institutions – universities mainly – that had brought them into contact with contemporaries from other parts of the world.


Any thought that the Commonwealth could successfully perpetuate the empire vanished with the Suez humiliation in 1956

Any thought that the Commonwealth could successfully perpetuate the empire vanished with the Suez humiliation in 1956, when Nehru and India sided with Gamal Abdel Nasser and Egyptover the Anglo-French assault. The ties to London began to weaken. Names changed to reflect different realities. Founded in 1930, the British Empire Games became the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in 1954, the British Commonwealth Games in 1970, and finally the Commonwealth Games in 1978.

On paper, the facts remain compelling. The countries of the Commonwealth spread across a fifth of the world’s land surface, contain nearly a third of the world’s population and produce around 15% of the world’s wealth (depending on the measure used). But how much does the Commonwealth affect the lives of the people behind these statistics? Hardly at all. The organisation defines itself as a “diverse community of 53 nations that work together to promote prosperity, democracy and peace”. Friendly politicians call it a useful talking shop. Many people in its constituent countries have never heard of it, or know the name only because of the games. Both its longevity and its apparent importance owe a lot to the enthusiasm of the Queen and the international affection for her.

Until the run-up to Brexit, the notion that the Commonwealth offered the UK economic salvation would have been comic. In 2010, it was left to Ukip’s manifesto to promise a Commonwealth Free Trade Area, which would account for “more than 20% of all international trade and investment” and enable Britain to flourish outside the EU. Ukip’s leader, Nigel Farage, later described the manifesto as “drivel”; nevertheless the Tory manifesto for the next general election, in 2015, pledged to “further strengthen our ties with our close Commonwealth allies, Australia, Canada and New Zealand”. And by the time the referendum came around, several prominent leavers, including Boris Johnson and the Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, were happy to say the UK had “betrayed” the Commonwealth when it joined the EEC in 1973. It was time, as a Daily Telegraph headline had it, to “embrace the Commonwealth”.

And the Commonwealth itself had not been idle. In a desire to be more obviously useful – particularly to the UK, its biggest backer – it had begun to sell itself as a business asset, boasting on its website of the common legal systems and language that led to a Commonwealth advantage where trade and investment flows increased by up to 20% and the cost of doing business could be cut by nearly the same. According to Murphy, the atmosphere in London was further politicised when the Royal Commonwealth Society, founded in 1868 as a literary and scientific institution, merged in 2015 with Commonwealth Exchange, a far harder-nosed outfit run by a Eurosceptic Tory, Tim Hewish, who became the society’s director of policy research.

But to the Brexiteer, the Commonwealth offered more than the prospect of increased trade (from a very low base: Australia takes 1.6% of UK exports and the Commonwealth as a whole 9.5%). Before the referendum, it was also talked up as an alternative source of immigrants, and better-quality immigrants, the kind we could pick and choose, at that. The question is, from which particular part? In 2013 Johnson, then London mayor, proposed a “bilateral free labour mobility zone” between the UK and Australia, writing in the Telegraph that “we British are more deeply connected with the Australians – culturally and emotionally – than with any other country on earth”. Hewish picked up the idea and published a paper for Commonwealth Exchange that extended it to Canada and New Zealand. There was no proposal, however, to include the countries of south Asia, Africa or the Caribbean – which just as many, if not more, Britons are as deeply connected to, culturally and emotionally, as others are to Australia.

The theme of this month’s Commonwealth heads of government meeting is “Towards a Common Future”. The host runs the risk of turning into the most unpopular guest.

The Shakespeare Lecture - Shaking the Superflux

by Yannis Varoufakis



Since brevity is, indeed, the soul of wit, let me begin by stating the obvious: I am as qualified to deliver an annual Shakespeare lecture in this splendid theatre as an ant that walks in wonder on an iPhone is able to explain the mystery that goes on under its feet. When Professor Richard Wilson approached me out of the blue, during some political event in London, with the bewildering proposal that I appear before you tonight to talk about Shakespeare I was simultaneously flattered and incredulous. “But, Richard”, I protested “I am as far from being a Shakespeare scholar as anyone can possibly be.” Richard retorted that it is because, rather than in spite, of my not being a Shakespeare scholar that he thought I was a good fit, going on to recite – to my amazement – a long string of references I had made in books and speeches to the Bard’s lines, plays and plots.

The immediate thought that came to mind was that dropping Shakespearian quotes is often the last resort of the uninspired scoundrel and most certainly an insufficient qualification for delivering tonight’s talk. But, on top or just below the surface of that thought came the remembrance of something that gave me pause – and made me, within a minute or so, accept Richard’s kind invitation. What was this something? It was the memory of what a tremendous import drama in general and Shakespeare in particular had made to the development of my thinking about our troubled world while in geographical and cultural transit from my native Greece to England.

Arriving at the University of Essex as a 17 year old in the Fall of 1978, a few months before the Winter of Discontent, I faced two immediate challenges. The first was the sense of impotence at the realisation that, while my English was passable, by leaving Greece I had lost the capacity to persuade; a capacity which I had worked hard to acquire in my own tongue as a politicised teenager during the course of a fascist dictatorship’s reign and after its collapse in the summer of 1974. The second challenge was how to take seriously my economics lecturers whose narratives of what makes societies tick seemed to me at once technically fascinating and utterly unfit to illuminate human economies. Shakespeare became my aide and counsel in the attempt to face both challenges.

While finding my feet here in England, I recalled how my Greek had improved through exposure to ancient Greek drama, how Antigone’s and Prometheus’ dilemmas had informed my politics and, yes, the resonance I felt when reading a copy of Hamlet that my father had lying about in our living room – a splendid modern Greek translation that pushed the boundaries of demotic Greek to limits usually reserved for original texts. Back then, in Athens, I had become intrigued with Jean Paul Sartre’s Marxist existentialism and was overjoyed to encounter the Prince’s existentialist angst without the tedium and obfuscation of French philosophy. And so it was that, weeks after arriving in this country, I invested in a cheap edition of Shakespeare’s collected works. The original motive was, I confess, instrumental: I was dying to improve my English so as to elevate my powers of persuasion in a new environment where, as I declared in a students’ union assembly, “We Greeks, perhaps along with the Irish, are the blacks of Europe”. Nevertheless, very, very soon I realised that Shakespeare’s plays could also shore up my courage to confront my economics textbooks and lecturers – indeed to look at them with a combination of sympathy and pity, before switching degrees from economics to mathematics. (Why stick to third-rate mathematics, which is a fair assessment of mainstream economics, when one can read mathematics-proper and, in one’s spare time, read the classic works of political economy that modern Universities, to their detriment, never teach anyway?) Thus, during my undergraduate years I spent my spare time immersed in two splendid Anglo-Celtic traditions:

On the one hand, there were the beautiful classic texts of David Hume, Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall and John Maynard Keynes. And on the other hand, the Bard. The contrast was astonishing. Searching for the roots of contemporary economic thinking, I hit upon David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. In it I discovered a striking axiom: “We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Our acts, in other words, spring naturally from our passions with Reason playing the role of a pair of impartial scales weighing up the passions and instructing us to act in a manner that serves the mightiest of them all, with no capacity whatsoever to trump any passion as irrational or wrong. Our sense of right and wrong is, in Hume’s thinking, an illusion, albeit a terribly useful one. For Hume, a convention emerges that we ride our horses on the left hand side of the road simply because if no such convention prevails we shall keep bumping into one another. Then, without realising it, the prediction that the next rider we come across will keep left becomes transformed into a normative belief that the next rider ought to keep left. Soon we believe deeply that riders who do not keep left are… morally defective! Having acquired this moral veneer, having become an ‘artificial virtue’ (Hume’s term), the convention becomes evolutionarily more stable when we are morally outraged whenever someone violates it. Thus conflict is minimised and, eventually, the convention turns into Common Law. Adam Smith, Hume’s disciple, took matters further in establishing an economic theory in defence of the market societies that were emerging then and which prevail to this day – capitalism in one word: Have you noticed how economists defend free-market capitalism as the best antidote to the inevitability of human belligerence? It is this pessimistic take on human nature that lies behind the celebration of markets as realms in which, as Adam Smith claimed, the common good is best served as long as people have no interest in serving the common good, too busy pursuing their private passions relentlessly. Provided markets are allowed to work without interference, harsh forces of demand and supply motivated by our greed power up an invisible hand which, behind our backs, harnesses our vices and channels our energies to serve the common good. Celebrating the selfish entrepreneur, Adam Smith wrote in the Wealth of Nations: “By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.” Private vices, in short, lead to public virtues as long as Hume’s sacralised conventions provide the legal framework. But they do so as long as we are motivated not by public virtues but, instead, by our private vices. Paradoxically, conflict driven by selfishness is at once the guarantor that market societies work harmoniously and the cause of its own demise.

To a young, leftist Greek, reading the British political economists from the original was at once enthralling and deeply dissatisfying. I could see that their argument was intriguing, superb and packed the mighty punch that only paradox can deliver. But in my bones I knew they had utterly missed the point about human nature the moment they assumed, along with Hume, that Reason is a mere slave of passions which, after Jeremy Bentham had finished with them, had boiled down to a single passion: a passion for a uni-dimensional thing called satisfaction or utility. Thankfully, the excited anger I felt at these brilliant political economists found an outlet. Theatre in general, and Shakespeare in particular, were my solace and the support mechanism that quelled my anger. “Unity, however desirable in political agitations”, I remember reading from a preface George Bernard Shaw wrote to one of his plays, “is fatal to drama.” No conflict no drama. “And without drama human reason atrophies”, I wrote on the margin. “The quintessential drama”, continued Shaw, is “at its best in conflict with the first broken, nervous attempts to formulate its own revolt against itself as it develops into something higher.” “That’s it!”, I surmised. That’s what is missing in Hume, in Smith and, much more so, in the infinitely inferior modern economics textbooks: the creative power of conflict without which human reasoning cannot rise higher, above that of cats, dogs and computers who also possess an instrumental Reason, a Reason that is the slave of their passion, their programming; a Reason lacking the ability to ask itself the hard question: “I crave X. I am programmed to crave X. But should I crave X?” The very question that is at the heart of the ancient Greek tragedies and, of course, Shakespeare.

Every time I felt exasperated by political economy’s sad depiction of humanity I would turn to my, by now, tattered Shakespeare volume. And when I was ready to put together my first single-authored book, under the telling title Rational Conflict, published eventually by Blackwell’s in 1991, I turned it into a battleground on which Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sophocles clashed mercilessly with the economists’ army of assumptions and models. In the Preface I wrote that, while a world without conflict is a laudable objective, unless we understand the creative function of conflict in helping to fashion the individual and shape society, a conflict-free utopia will move further away as our grasp of our present circumstances, which engender hideous conflicts, remain incomplete. Of course, there is no doubt that, at times, we all wish that our Reason became Sovereign leading, with the help of the invisible hand of unintended consequences, to a benign equilibrium which negates conflict. Enlisting Hamlet to make the point that he put to Horatio, I quoted:

…and bless’d are those/ Whose blood and judgement are so well comingled,/ That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger/ To sound what stop she pleases. Give me that man/ That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him/ In my heart’s core, oy, in my heart of heart,/ As I do thee (Act III, ii, 73)

And there’s the rub, which economists cannot recognise: How to comingle our blood and judgment without being our passion’s slave. Economists love to think of themselves as the scientists of society. In that book I angered my profession by arguing that economists are merely storytellers. Indeed, we tell meta-stories, stories about stories (also called social theories) the purpose of which is to help us understand a social world that is constantly under construction around us, and within which we are both active contributors and incessant interpreters. Incapable of a genuine Archimedean perspective, from which to judge simultaneously both our world and our account of it, we resort to analysing and re-analysing the sort of stories we tell ourselves about our selves. In a chapter entitled “The economist as playwright” I asked the question: Can good theatre be written without violating the axioms of economics? And if it can’t is this proof that theatre has little to teach us about economic life or, more plausibly, that economics misses the essence of society – thus explaining how a smart woman like Margaret Thatcher could have concluded, once she immersed herself into neoliberal economics, that there is no such thing as society – only individuals doing what they like and liking what they do?

How did Macbeth, I asked, choose his path after having listened to the witches’ prophecy that he will become King of Scotland? If his choices were predetermined, the play becomes processional and… boring. But could an economist ever conceptualise Macbeth’s choices as genuinely hard and ex ante indeterminate? Recall that for economists we are all bargain hunters incapable of resisting anything that will increase our net expected utility gains by a smidgen of an iota. We only hesitate in front of equally profitable options. So, for Macbeth to hesitate before plunging his dagger into Duncan’s sleeping body, his expected gains from committing and not committing the first crime in the Scottish play must have been equal. But then how did he, in the end, choose? The only answer an economist can give without abandoning her theoretical take is by imagining that he decided by tossing a coin. And similarly with Sophocles’ depiction of Antigone’s impossibly hard choice to burry or not to burry her fallen brother; to respect the rule of law or to follow her conviction that a higher, an ethical law, compelled her to break her state’s law. My conclusion was simple: If Macbeth and Antigone, Shakespeare and Sophocles, made these choices as if by randomising, the resulting plays would have been confined long ago to the dustbin of cultural history. And this tells us that there is something profoundly amiss with the economists’ logic. But what exactly is it that is amiss?

It is, I continued, the possibility that a rational person, unlike any cat, dog or computer algorithm, has the capacity to defy the programming that nature and nurture has hardwired into her mind. Unlike any android or animal, Macbeth and Antigone can defy their dominant strategy for rational reasons external to their calculus of utility, passion, preference or desire. They can reason in ways that Hume and the economists would never concede. Even if we rarely rise to the occasion, even if we live life mostly as automata, the very fact that we can, with good reason, potentially deviate from the path that would ostensibly best serve our existing passions and preferences is what makes us human – and plays like Macbeth and Antigone timeless. With this capacity in the air, the audience, on the edge of their seats, suddenly expect the unexpected at every moment because ‘uniqueness’ no longer guarantees determinism. They anticipate dramatic choices not only when the alternatives are equally inviting for the characters but even when they are not!

On this account, Aeschylus raised Prometheus from the obscurity and banality of the Hesiodic tale by empowering him to experiment with a subversive, a deviant act whose merits escape anyone motivated solely by the question: “What’s in it for me?” Of course, other more cynical interpretations are always available. Prometheus could simply be suffering from imperfect information; failing to predict the punishment Zeus would inflict on him for giving humanity the gift of fire, of technology. Even worse, Prometheus could have enjoyed martyrdom, in a masochistic sort of way, or might have cared for his heroic profile enough to think of the ensuing, interminable pain a reasonable price to pay – a form of investment. However, these interpretations cheapen the character created by Aeschylus. No tragedy is worth its salt if it is based on the exploits of a hero who simply miscalculated or who unexpectedly learnt how to derive masochistic pleasures when things turned out differently to his original plan.

These musings gradually culminated, toward the end of my book, to the conclusion that high theatre, just like free will, is impossible without radical indeterminacy. But even if we agree that indeterminacy is a prerequisite for a good play, it is not enough. Something must help us understand the manner in which the protagonist eventually dissolves the indeterminacy and chooses her actions. And that something better not be a randomisation, the tossing of a coin. We may never be able to put our finger on it but, and this is the stuff of good theatre, as the drama unfolds we recognise the reasons that led her to the deviant actions. Macbeth adds crime to crime, as a result of successive choices that he ‘fell’ into when ‘murder’ was one of several options. He then emerges defeated while simultaneously victorious. Powerless while fully in power, and more powerful than ever in defeat! When he achieves clarity toward the play’s end, he tells us that he wished his ‘beliefs’ were expunged:

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseas’d,/ Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,/ Raze out the written troubles of the brain,/ And with some sweet oblivious antidote/ Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff/ Which weighs upon the heart (Macbeth, V,iii,40-44)

But at the same time when forced to choose between a dignified and a humiliating death he re-discovers his dignity:

…Lay on Macduff,/ And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ (Macbeth, V,vii,62-3)

The economist, I argued, can only see in Macbeth an irrational agent who miscalculated or who was imperfectly informed. What they ignore purposely is the absurdity of their axiom that Macbeth’s motivation, his personality, determines unidirectionally his choices. They need to make this assumption because, once choice contaminates motivation, motivation cannot fully determine the choice. Indeterminacy is, therefore, irrepressible not just as the stuff of good theatre but also as a prerequisite for human development and a decent understanding of economic life. Here is where I must introduce another Greek word, praxis, which I shall juxtapose against its English equivalent: action or choice. The difference of praxis, in the ancient Greek meaning, from a mere act or choice is the potential to generate not only events but also to re-shape the actor, the decision-maker, the doer. The importance of praxis for deciding what kind of theatre and economics we want is not hard to discern: Macbeth’s tragedy is not so much about his fate and final destruction, not about the outcome per se, as it is about the transformation of his self through praxes – a transformation that the theoretical economist cannot concede without losing a capacity to solve her models and to deliver economic forecasts. Even sophisticated economics, that takes a Darwinian view and depicts behaviours as memes that adapt and mutate, can only solve their model if these ‘mutations’, our deviant actions, are statistically uncorrelated ‘mutations’ – in other words, actions which, unlike praxes, cannot be causally linked to the evolution of character.

If we are to make room for a proper two-way process, from self to action and from action to self (the process that I call praxis), theatre regains its potency and meaning while the models economists teach in our universities collapse into a heap. Why? Because no mathematical model of behaviour can be solved if it allows for this two-way street, where motives beget actions and actions alter the motives. This backwards and forwards between motives and actions renders the models indeterminate – something like a system of two equations in more than two unknowns. Still, praxis is the very essence of good plays like Antigone and Macbeth where acts flow from motives but then shape who they truly are. The great danger here is that we go from the extreme of the economists’ determinism to a relativism which, while acknowledging indeterminacy, portrays Macbeth’s actions as arbitrary and non-rational – as a postmodern agent for whom any behaviour is as good as any other. The essence of good theatre, and good economics, I tried to convince my readers and students, is the possibility of having a complete, modernist, riveting script without determinism. The key is the admittance into the plot of twists that defy the protagonists’ ostensibly most profitable, their optimal strategy, and in so doing capture the audience’s imagination while explaining how history accelerates when humans rationally defy, in today’s parlance, their own software. It is only when characters who reasonably and purposely deviate from some uniquely attractive choice that we learn something momentous about both the said characters and the human condition – for example Prometheus’ theft of fire on behalf of humanity or Brutus’ decision to put the Republic above his friendship with Julius Caesar. The question, then, becomes: Where does the rationality of deviant behaviour come from if not from the calculus of desire or the Humean balancing act between competing passions? The difference, I submit, between a hero and a rational lunatic is elusive when the reasons supporting an action are strictly internal to one’s passions, desires, preferences. If Prometheus had reasons for serving humanity exclusively internal to his passions, or Brutus was a personal gratification maximiser who computed that his inter-temporal net utility was maximised by murdering Caesar, their choices would not be dissimilar to those of a terrorist who blows himself up in a crowded square calculating that his expected net gains from martyrdom in Heaven outweigh the damage he is about to inflict on Earth. Indeed, toning down the drama, let’s for a moment think of the difference between a kleptomaniac and a shoplifter. The kleptomaniac acts on pathological reasons external to any Humean calculus of passions or desire. The shoplifter on the other hand is a calculating agent acting on internal reasons. The question is: Unlike in the case of the kleptomaniac who is incapable of rational control over of his external reasons for action, can external reasons be marshalled by a rational will? Prometheus and other heroic figures may only be different from fanatics to the extent that they choose rationally to ignore what passes through the Humean gate of instrumental reasoning. They act upon principles of what is right that set aside as irrelevant their passions or any prospective satisfaction from their action. Of course, every sword is double-edged. Richard the Third gate-crushes this discussion of rational heroes because he too struggles to will himself to actions underpinned by reasons external to his calculus of preference. Except that he wills himself to be evil! Perhaps Shakespeare’s most precious lesson, for me at least, is that external reasons for action – reasons that economists can by definition never grasp – are the true makings of both true heroes and true villains.

Now, I have been talking about Sophocles, Aeschylus and Shakespeare in the same breath. It is often said that Shakespeare differs from the Greeks in that he is happy to leave his plays open-ended, content to put indeterminacy on the stage and leave it there as the curtain falls. In contrast, the Greeks need their catharsis, often brought onto the stage by a Deus ex Machina. While I understand this argument, I do not share it. Catharsis takes many different forms. For instance Brutus running toward the sword held by a loyal servant is cathartic, especially in view of Anthony’s eulogy later. Or Prospero’s final act of giving up his sorcery and his books as justice is restored. Indeterminacy also takes many different forms and is as much part of the Greek tradition as it is prevalent in Shakespeare. What makes it so is a readiness to infuse rationality with irrationality in the defence of deviance and rebelliousness. Yes, Prometheus in the end is spared but the real catharsis for the audience comes from his rational selection of a seemingly irrational but worthy choice. Medea commits the most heinous crime known to man, maddened by pain, but her defiant act is a supreme, rational and very contemporary rebellion against women’s objectification. How the play ends does not matter much, at least to me. It is how a play is staged that brings out the sheer beauty and creative power of resolved indeterminacy. Run-of-the-mill Hollywood movie makers and economists alike think of actors as people shedding their personality, stepping into predetermined roles, and struggling to impersonate some character whose entire presence flows from the script. But, what distinguishes high theatre and great movies from third-rate drama is that it gives actors a chance not to impersonate the character but to personify the character. They get an opportunity to bring on stage their selves, their own interpretation of the inner conflict that characterises the choice of some deviant strategy with no need either for a predetermined take on events or for an open-ended, relativist, postmodern, multi-player video game-like, script. Since the coexistence of Reason and Unreason in the same behavioural pattern is inherently confusing, the actor can draw from her own past whatever is necessary to convey the intensity of such choices.

Does any of this matter beyond the world of theatre? I think it does, and that Shakespeare demonstrates this amply. He shows that to understand conflict in the social world around us it is obligatory to look into a conflicted heart overseen by a bright mind – whether that is Richard the 3rd, Macbeth, Brutus or Shylock. If we are to follow him without abandoning the realm of rational analysis, the only option is to enrich our perception of it. Rejecting the economists’ mindset in favour of Shakespeare’s is an excellent start. And not just for the benefit of humanist studies, good literature or excellent theatre. No, we need to abandon the economists’ mindset in the interests of good economics and of a better social order too. Let me speak to this very briefly. Remember the collapse of international finance in 2008, our generation’s 1929? Remember how for two decades prior to that bankers built up mountains of private money in the form of terribly complicated forms of debt – derivatives as they called them? Did they not get what small children on the beach learn through building sandcastles; that at some point if you keep piling sand on top of sand, paper assets on top of paper assets, your pile will tumble down? No, they did not. Why not? Because they were building their toxic derivatives on the basis of mathematical equations that predicted their value and reported to them every morning and every night how much money they stood to lose that day. Until the very last moment, when the bottom fell out of all financial markets at once, and we had to bailout them out at the expense of a lost generation, their mathematics were telling them that their potential losses were tiny. Why were their equations so badly wrong? For a simple reason: The financier’s models were built on the assumption that the probability of correlated losses was tiny. Insurance companies have every reason to think that when it comes to accident insurance. What is the probability that if Ann breaks a leg skiing in Switzerland will be causally related to you breaking a leg when walking home tonight? Zero. Taking their cue from this, they assumed that the probability of correlated bankruptcies was close to zero; that the chances that Jill would go bankrupt because Jack did were nil. What they forgot was that, in a crisis, almost everyone goes bankrupt at once. It was the equivalent of assuming that the probability of the crisis they were trying to predict is… zero. They resembled meteorologists who tried to predict the probability of a tornado once he has assumed that no tornado can ever happen – poor Michael Fish! The question of course is: Where did the financiers find the confidence to make such an absurd assumption? And the answer is… In the economists’ theoretical models which assume away praxis, reducing it to acts motivated purely by internal reasons, before also assuming that greed and conflicting interests will always and necessarily lead to an equilibrium that serves the public interest because everyone is as uninterested in the public interest, and as self-serving, as the financiers knew themselves to be. In short, while economists did not commit the crimes, they provided the theories, the latter-day sermons, that steadied the hands that pulled the trigger, that gave the financiers the confidence to jeopardise everyone’s well being. And the gist of those models was the axioms about human nature and rational choice that, if allowed to infect theatre, would produce terrible theatre – economic axioms that anyone who read a tattered copy of Shakespeare’s Collected Works as a younger woman or man would instantly dismiss.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, just in case I have not made myself clear on this, I am indeed arguing that Shakespeare should be compulsory reading for economics students. Sophocles, Marlow, Shelley, and Aeschylus too. Perhaps the only thing that economics students should not be allowed to read is… economics textbooks: the type of book written as if to make it impossible for its readers to recognise, let alone analyse, really existing capitalism. This being a paradox that I could speak forever on, let me fast forward to the era after 2008, once the financiers had created a dystopian post-2008 world which is impossible to understand in pre-2008 terms and which is, increasingly, resembling a post-modern version of the 1930s.

As is, alas, well known, my country went bankrupt in 2010. And the oligarchies, Greek and European, in power decided to cover it up by means of largest loan in History to the most bankrupt European state – money that was, always, meant to flow on to France’s and Germany’s bankrupt bankers while the Greeks were thrown indefinitely into debtor’s prison and treated to the harshest austerity this planet has ever seen. Yes, there was method to the madness of the powers-that-be, just as in any Shakespearean play. Watching them stumble from one idiotic decision to the next, making things up as they were going along, and intensifying the crisis that they were trying to quell, was like watching a version of Othello, wondering how smart people could be so foolish, or of a Macbeth scheming in the land of Oedipus. Like King Laius of Thebes unwittingly brought about his own murder by his son Oedipus because he believed the prophecy that Oedipus would kill him once he grew up, so too did Europe’s Deep Establishment, in a bid to save their bankers while safeguarding their legitimacy, undermined their legitimacy by committing successive, Macbeth-like, crimes against logic – so much so that, today, the so-called political centre traditionally in the service of the Establishment lays in ruins everywhere in Europe: Think France, Austria, Germany, recently Italy, where political monsters are rising up across Europe bringing to mind Brutus’ line in Julius Caesar about the hatchling of the serpent’s egg that must be “killed in the shell” before it emerges. Except that, instead of crushing the shell before the new serpents hatched, the Establishment kept it warm, facilitated its hatching, and is now repeatedly bitten by them.

In my recent memoir, Adults in the Room, I recount how at the end of my first meeting with the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, at the meeting’s end, walking towards the door, we got a chance for a short, relaxed but telling tête-à-tête. Taking her cue from the points I had raised, Christine Lagarde surprised me by seconding my appeals for debt relief and lower tax rates as prerequisites for a Greek recovery. With calm and gentle honesty she said: “You are of course right, Yanis. These targets that we insist on can’t work. But, you must understand that we have put too much political capital into this program. We cannot go back on it. Your credibility depends on accepting and working within this program.” My jaw dropped before a smile emerged from within as I recalled a far better phrasing of her confession. Lagarde might as well have said: “What’s done cannot be undone.” Or, even more to the point,

…I am in blood/ Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,/ Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

Turning to the challenge of writing up that memoir, it must be said that no account by any protagonist to a cutthroat drama can escape bias or the desire for vindication. To be as fair and impartial as possible, I tried to see their actions and my own through the lens of a Shakespearean play, like for example Julius Caesar, in which fallible characters, neither good nor bad, are overtaken by the unintended consequences of their conception of what they ought to do. Most of the persons I encountered and wrote about in Adults in the Roombelieved they were acting appropriately, but, taken together, their acts produced misfortune on a continental scale. Is this not the stuff of Sophocles and Shakespeare? Indeed, with every meeting, especially with the troika’s smarter and less insecure officials, the impression grew on me that this was not a simple tale of us against them, good versus bad. I witnessed how the moment the supremely powerful recognised their powerlessness, the hatches were battened down and official denial prevailed. Even when it was abundantly clear that they would get less money from Greece if they strangled us, than if they accepted my proposals, Shylock-like they demanded their pound of flesh from the Greek people. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I had the unenviable job of negotiating – like Bassanio – with creditors who did not want their money back. And while sorrows came to my people, not as single spies, but in battalions, the consequences of the tragic impasse Europe’s Establishment created were left to unfold on autopilot, imprisoning them further in a situation they detested. This impression became ever so clear in my final meetings with the German finance minister, his shoulders drooping from the realisation that, despite his immense power, he was powerless to do what deep down he thought right.

As in all tragedies, the most thankless and painful of tasks is working out how one could have been fooled by one’s comrades. People ask me on the street: Why did you not see that your comrades were, Iago-like, plotting your defeat from Day 1? The simplest explanation is, of course, that I was another fool indulging a penchant for wishful thinking, projecting on comrades qualities they lacked. Be that as it may, a puzzle remains: Why was I not fooled by most of them – whom I recognised as plotters of our surrender from very early on – but I did not see my Prime Minister’s machinations coming? The answer I came to, in the end, is that he, Alexis, was the only character that was not banal in Hannah Arendt’s sense of the term. He had to talk himself into crossing his own red lines, which is the opposite of never having the intention of keeping to them. I can imagine Alexis saying to himself, Richard the 3rd-like:

And therefore, since I cannot prove a rebel,/ To entertain these fair well-spoken days,/ I am determined to prove a villain.

He struggled to reconcile himself to betraying our red lines, to find peace in crossing them. It was, I am convinced, his inner voice that was both his strength and his downfall, both the usurper of our common project and the reason why I believed him almost to the bitter end.

A few weeks ago a highly sympathetic review of Adults in the Room appeared in the New York Review of Books, authored by a good, solid Columbia University economist. In his concluding remark he writes: “Varoufakis adorns his narrative with references to… tragedy… As far as the eurozone is concerned these are largely beside the point. What he has actually given us is something more prosaic but no less important: a deeply reflective, first-person insight into the workings of modern power and politics.” This is proof that economists, even decent ones, simply do not get it. They do not get that a proper insight into the workings of modern power and politics is impossible without the perspective of a Shakespeare or a Sophocles. Economists must, I submit to you, be deprogrammed before they begin to see that justice is not a matter of how the superflux, the economic surplus, is redistributed away from those with the power to extract it. Shakespeare’s plays shine a brilliant light on the established powers’ desperate attempts to avoid ethical accountability. They insist that ethics is for wimps, that the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. But, in the end, unjust power gets its comeuppance in proportion to its magnitude. What Shakespeare has taught me, and I shall be forever grateful for this lesson, is that what passes for political realism has no capacity to hold our societies together because in the end it is… utopian to believe that the few can oppress and exploit the many sustainably without becoming enslaved by their own insecurity, paranoia and, in the end, induced incompetence. As my friend Slavoj Zizek said in a message of support of MeRA25, the new Greek political party that we are about to found in Athens next Monday: “We are not dreamers. While the true utopians sit in their comfortable fat chairs in Brussels, we are the agents of the European awakening.”

But, lest I turn this into a party political broadcast, let me go back to the superflux and what shaking it profitably for human society and human flourishing means. It cannot mean, despite rumours to the contrary, philanthropy or mere redistribution of the establishment’s loot. Philanthropy, and altruism, when extreme in magnitude, lead to bankruptcy and, ultimately to misanthropy – as Shakespeare demonstrates in Timon of Athens. And when milder, philanthropy or redistribution of the sort that King Lear thinks he should have practised when he had the chance, it becomes an engine that reproduces privilege and exploitation. Permit me to state this: Nothing is more dangerous to society than a ruling class on good terms with its conscience. No! In my estimation, shaking the superflux, “showing the heavens more just”, requires much, much more than sharing the surplus more ‘fairly’. It requires solidarity with the exploited which, in turn, requires that we work tirelessly to abolish the main cause of systemic misery: institutionalised exploitation – especially if this means the abolition of our privileges and power that, in the end, makes even the powerful feel empty vessels, powerless playthings of forces beyond their control.

From this perspective, to shake the superflux, and not just to stir it pitiably, the last thing we need are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising inequality, or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism to some pre-modern, pre-technological, parochial nation-state where we can cling to the bosom of nationalism. (I promise that, tonight, this shall be my sole allusion to Brexit.) No, what we need is to grasp the tragic dynamic of capitalism. When journalists ask me how can a smart person still declare himself a Marxist, albeit an erratic one, I respond thus: If capitalism appears unjust, it is because it enslaves everyone, rich and poor, capitalist and worker, wasting human and natural resources. The problematic nexus of capital and waged labour stops us from enjoying our work and our artefacts, and turns employers and workers, rich and poor, into mindless, quivering pawns who are being quick-marched towards a pointless existence by forces beyond our control. The same ‘production line’ that pumps out untold wealth also produces deep unhappiness and discontent on an industrial scale. This perspective, that guides my thinking every day, I owe as much to Marx as I do to Shakespeare.

So, our first task must be to recognise the tendency of capital – this all-conquering economic ‘energy’ – to undermine itself. Can there be a more Shakespearean take on our society’s condition? Think back to the opening line of the Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe.’ Like Hamlet confronted by the spectre of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: Should I conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s technology-driven, irresistible forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new society? Should I adapt this idiotic world to my beliefs or my beliefs to this idiotic world? Depending on how we each answer Hamlet’s re-worked question, humanity may succeed in securing social arrangements which, with the help of our new robotic slaves, will allow for ‘the free development of each’ as the ‘condition for the free development of all’. But, then again, we may end up in the ‘common ruin’ of nuclear war, environmental disaster, or agonising discontent as the superflux, unshaken, is concentrated more and more in the hands of the powerless powerful.

There are no guarantees – just as in Shakespeare’s plays where indeterminacy rules supreme and catharsis is in the eye of the beholder. This is why democratic politics is indispensable. But isn’t politics stultifying, especially socialist politics, which Oscar Wilde once claimed ‘takes up too many evenings’? The answer is: Because we cannot end this idiocy individually! Because, no market-based mechanism can ever emerge that will produce an antidote to this stupidity and shake the superflux. Collective, democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment. Maybe, as the establishment is turning Parliament into farce we must turn our theatres into Parliaments. And for this, the long nights seem a small price to pay.