Review: Yanis Varoufakis, : My battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment

Marnie Holborow

ill with his uncompromising exposé of the Troika terror regime. His overall political conclusions, likewise, fail to carry through the logic of his portrayal of the un- democratic nature of the EU. He certainly gives in raw detail what has suffered. When he became Fi- nance Minister, it had lost 25% of its GDP, its minimum wage reduced by 40%, its pen- sioners had seen their living standards drop by 25%, one million Greeks could not pay their electricity bills, many did not have the money to put food on the table. The island of , whose inhabitants are renowned for their pride, experienced the highest number of suicides. The story of Lambros, a trans- lator who lost his job, his job and his family, Yanis Varoufakis, Adults in the Room: My battle with Eu- rope’s Deep Establishment, The Bodley Head, e18.99 stays with Varoufakis as Lambros implored him not to sell out like other governments did. The never-ending spiral of austerity policies, Varoufakis notes, has condemned The Dead-end of the EU and Greece to a social version of a Dickensian , as seen from the In- debtors’ prison and thrown away the key. side Varoufakis is new to establishment poli- tics and, with fresh eyes, he reveals the EU’s Yanis Varoufakis, in his new book, lays bare total distain for democracy. His account the rottenness of the EU for all to see. As the gives an inside story of the EU bureaucracy, new Greek Finance Minister, he landed right which has all the ghoulish goings-on of an into the bullying and fiscal waterboarding episode of Versailles. He is also able to make - his apt term - of the EU’s relentless aus- astute observations about the capitalist na- terity drive. He describes every step from ture of the EU. ‘I observed first hand’, he January to July in the fateful year of 2015, writes ‘what I can only describe as naked from the amazing defiance of the Greek peo- class war that targeted the weak and scan- ple to the further austerity blow of another, dalously favoured the ruling class’. worse Memorandum of Understanding, de- He shows how the January 2015 Greek livered this time by the Left-wing SYRIZA change of government, and the ‘no’ vote in government. July, simply never figured in the Troika’s Adults in the Room takes its title from calculations. German finance minister, a remark from IMF chief Wolfgang Schäuble, insisted that elections who claimed at one of the endless meetings could not be allowed to change economic that the crisis called for adults in the room. policy. His inside account provides a sober Varoufakis’s curious embrace of this term, as message for those who, post-Brexit, on this well as his obvious respect for Lagarde, sits island and in the UK, pin their hopes on a

76 supposedly liberal or democratic EU. reaucrats in forcing more austerity on the The blow by blow account, based on Greeks. Galway economist Declan Costello Varoufakis’s recorded conversations, of the headed up the ’s mis- meetings of the read like show sion to Greece as part of its hated troika trials. The Eurogroup is an informal gather- of lenders. Varoufakis dubs Michael Noo- ing of the Eurozone’s Finance Ministers and nan ‘Schäuble’s model prisoner’ who takes has no legal status in EU law but this does a strong austerity line for fear ‘that upstart not stop it having crucial and extensive pow- Greece might escape having to do what they ers. The set ritual of these meetings, Varo- had been forced to do already in which case ufakis explains, was completely Schäuble- their own people might demand to know why dominated with everybody – Eastern Eu- they had not resisted austerity too’. ropean ministers, the bailed-out countries Michael Roberts, a Marxist who has including Ireland, and French and Italian written on the current Long Depression, says hangers on – parroting his and the ECB’s that for Greece there were three options tune, for fear of falling foul of . in 2015. The first was the neoliberal so- Varoufakis explodes other myths. Euro- lution demanded by the Troika. The sec- pean banks were much more reckless than ond was the Keynesian one advocated by Wall St. French, German, Dutch and British the left wing of SYRIZA which Varoufakis banks had exposure in excess of $30 trillion did not support, which theoretically would during the crisis, more than twice the US have meant boosting public spending to in- national income. As Varoufakis wryly ob- crease demand cancelling part of the govern- serves, ‘If Wall St deserved the wrath of the ment debt, and introducing a new currency American public, Europe’s banks deserved to make Greek industry more competitive 38.8 times that wrath’. Washington was in a in new markets. In practice, as Varoufakis position to use the Federal Reserve to hold shows, the SYRIZA option became no op- its bad assets. But Brussels and the ECB tion at all and morphed into worse austerity. were not. That made the EU rigidly tied The third was a socialist solution whose first to austerity and taking the cash to bail out step would be to replace Greek capitalism the banks from the people, as we in Ireland with a , with Greek banks know only too well. and major companies publicly owned, and On his recent visit to Dublin, in a panel the drive for profit replaced by investment, interview on RTE, Varoufakis reminded us growth and meeting the urgent needs of the again of the crimes the EU inflicted on Ire- people. Crucial to this being implemented land. Unlike Greece, Ireland was forced to was mobilization and creating people-led, bail out private not public debt, leaving us bottom up European-wide movements that today and forever with a burden of e200bn’s operated outside the asphyxiating structures worth of debt. He castigated the Irish gov- of the EU. ernment as pathetically weak for giving in Unfortunately Varoufakis’s proposed so- without a whimper. He dismissed any sug- lutions fall within the ambit of the first op- gestion of an Irish recovery by describing Ire- tion.. It is true that his guiding light was to land post-crash as ‘a dual economy, with a get debt restructuring and, to his credit, un- German part and a Greek part’ - one for the like others, he stuck to this principle to the wealthy, doing boisterously well, and one for end. But in other respects, his proposals as the poor, doing very badly with lack of hous- outlined in the book, were in sync with, not ing, poor services and many still forced to against, neoliberal Europe. A striking ex- become emigrants. ample was his plan to off-set the impending In the book, Varoufakis highlights for us Greek default through more privatization. the complicity of Irish politicians and bu- He recounts how he attempted to get the

77 Chinese conglomerate Cosco to extend their quoting George Orwell, says that parties al- ownership of the Port of Piraeus, to ways end up making their members blindly get companies like Foxconn, with offers of follow Big Brother. Events showed other- special business tax rates, to build produc- wise as after SYRIZA capitulated, a sec- tion and assembly facilities nearby and to tion of their MPs and many hundred on the persuade the Chinese government to buy up ground left them in disgust. some of the Greek debt to boot. The plan It was a specific politics that was to fell through. Ironically, Berlin contacted blame, as the examples Varoufakis gives Beijing to tell them to withdraw from any show. Tsipras cynically used the anti - deals with the Greeks until the Troika deal austerity Thessaloniki programme to gain was done. support but never intended it to be imple- Varoufakis is scathing of the role of mented. This is condemned by Varoufakis French and Italian social democrats, of not as parliamentary opportunism but as an the French Finance Minister, Sapin, who inexplicable manipulation. ducked, deferred and simulated. But he has Most shocking to us in Ireland, since we no problem heaping praise on Emmanuel demonstrated in our thousands in solidarity Macron. He criticises the Italian finance with the ‘Oxi’ vote in July 2015, are Varo- minister Pier Carlo Padoan, formerly the ufakis revelations about SYRIZA’s cynical OECD’s chief economist for his attacks on political calculations about the referendum. workers’ rights. Yet Varoufakis’s Cosco pro- Tsipras called it, according to Varoufakis, posal took no account of what the dockers with the conviction that it would result in wanted. He refers to his affinity which he has a yes vote. This would let them off the hook with the mobilizations on Syntagma Square and allow another memorandum to pass. On and his first action as Minister was to rein- the night of the result, Varoufakis was with state over three hundred cleaners who had the other SYRIZA Ministers, and when the been sacked from their jobs at the Finance NO vote came in at an amazing 62.5%, he Ministry who had been sacked by the previ- was the only one in the room celebrating. ous government. But workers’ struggles as a Varoufakis had already sensed the trans- key tool against the Troika, supplementing formation of SYRIZA into another auster- the popular mandate of the new government, ity party but he is shocked at the speed get little mention. of Tsipras’s surrender. He describes how What Varoufakis, for all his ‘sophistica- SYRIZA ministers increasingly came to tion’ never seems to grasp, is that the ut- look like accountants and succumb to the ter intransigence of the EU and the Troika Thatcher doctrine of TINA – there is no al- was not based on a particular ‘mistaken’ eco- ternative. Varoufakis refused to go along nomic strategy for Greece, which they could with the Memorandum, and Tsipras put him be argued out of, but on an absolute deter- under pressure to resign. His close collabo- mination to punish and humiliate Greece ‘for rator, friend and long- time SYRIZA mem- the sake of the others’, lest the idea of resis- ber Euclid Tsakalotus duly assumed his po- tance should be contagious. This is why they sition and took over the implementation of were simply not interested in Varoufakis’s the most vicious third memorandum. clever arguments. This was not an error, Varoufakis tends to see things in individ- but class war. ual terms, and thus a convincing analysis of Surprisingly, given the dramatic auster- SYRIZA’s capitulation eludes him. He fails ity about-turn made by SYRIZA, Varoufakis to point out that the pressure of the system provides little real analysis of why things and the politics of , as it had done went so wrong. Varoufakis faults the char- for PASOK before, would bring SYRIZA in- acter of Tsipras more than his politics and, evitably to the austerity path. At a deeper

78 level, because Varoufakis shared SYRIZA’s and good to deeply criticize the ruling order. trust in the EU, even if he remained true to But it will take more than moral outrage of his principles about another memorandum, an ‘outsider’ to dismantle the source of the his alternative to wrest debt restructuring problem. It’s not that the EU has gone awry, within the framework of the EU, was only a but that it is representing the same interests shade different to SYRIZA’s. that set it up in the first place. It is not in- Although Varoufakis claims to be polit- dividuals or belief systems which are at fault ical outsider, his book makes plain that he but the structural imperatives of capitalism. is in fact quite a system insider. He is per- This is why Varoufakis embracing an insider sonal friends with , Norman strategy has no hope of success. In the last Lamont, Jeffrey Sachs, and Larry Summers, paragraphs of the book he gives away the to mention just a few. The movement that weakness of his project: DiEM25 has ‘the Varoufakis has helped to found, DiEM25, hope of being around to pick up the pieces certainly represents no break with the po- when the whole EU edifice comes tumbling litical status quo. Its aims are to bring to- down’. gether democrats, Greens, radical left liber- Yet history does not unfold like that. als, to stop the rise of ‘misanthropy, xeno- What the Greek people did in 2015 made phobia and toxic nationalism’ and to ‘repair a difference. For one, they inspired the the EU’. It proposes to implement a ‘New anti-austerity movement in Ireland and fed Deal policy agenda without Treaty changes’, into our confidence to strike with the water and to stabilize and democratize Europe. charges movement a successful blow against Just how this will happen especially in light austerity. of the effective waterboarding that the EU meted out to Varoufakis himself, remains a The fourth latest bailout deal, pushed mystery. In reality, without specific propos- through by the SYRIZA government this als beyond the setting up of a ‘transnational May, contains more spending and pension party’, DiEM25 is proposing nothing very cuts, higher taxes and increased privatiza- different to what EU insiders – like Guy Ver- tion, new legislation to curb or eliminate hofstadt or Jean Claude Juncker – now say, strikes. In the run-up period it met with post-Brexit. In the recent UK general elec- strikes and demonstrations on Syntagma tion DIEM25 distinguished itself by endors- Square. Adults in the Room from that point ing 25 ‘progressive candidates’ including the of view, says no more than what the Greek hated former Liberal Democrat leader, Nick people have come to know full well: that Clegg (the Joan Burton of British politics, the EU is not for turning. Clinging to the who lost his seat) but NOT ! EU in the vain hope that it can be ‘re- Varoufakis believes, like Swift’s Gulliver paired’ offers no way forward. It is not about stumbling into a mass of human irrational- making the EU change its mind but about ity and stupidity, his tale will make the EU finding ways to build again the resistance austerity regime see the error of its ways. and the tested strength of people power in Incredibly, after what his country has been Greece. That means a Grexit led by an anti- through, he claims in all of this there are ‘no austerity movement to escape from the fis- good guys or bad guys’. Instead he wrote cal waterboarding of the EU. Nothing else the book, he says, to get inside the heads of will work – something which Varoufakis’s ac- Merkel, Schäuble, Eurogroup head, Dijssel- count proves, even it fails to provide a way bloem to understand them better. All well out.

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