Anybody remember how quickly this guy sold everybody out as soon as Syriza got voted in. This guy is the worst spokesman for anything and it's telling that he's now gonna be an important traveling leftie Face. Reminds me of the CIA vs CIA Chomsky vs Buckley debate.
Call me an absolutist, but the whole Eurozone project is an antidemocratic death star. And though he's not an obvious toad like Tsipras, I remember seeing a headline like this and thinking, "Wow, there never really was any hope, was there." That he gracefully pirouetted away with his "lefty creds" intact still bothers me.
It was Varoufkis's insistence in staying in the EU that gave away the game and still does, not how he behaved at one particular moment. I remember the Naked Capitalism bunch pushed this guy hard during the Greek crisis. And Naked Capitalism is pretty lib once you scratch the surface. All arguements end with "Eurozone good!" He was given to the greeks (and now the rest of us) to explicitly NOT give them what they wanted, much like the rest of our political class. But this one talks good.............
I wasn't gonna reply after my initial comment was blasted. I did have to refresh my memory just to make sure I wasn't just being a contrarian asshole -but yeah- I remember now. Then a few posters showed up with a frame of reference larger than the last two years. So thank you for that.
I'm also interested in whatever this criticism is because Yanis even has a critical support take on China which is saying something of any leftist public figure in the current climate.
He is bad but not really for the reasons this person brought up. Varoufakis did resign when Syriza trashed the result of the referendum, as did many other people. But he is bad for a multitude of reasons surrounding both his political and economical analysis, and for his absolute shit attitude towards the rest of the left (I'll get to what I mean in a while) and his lib brain. I mean, it's not like his views would be super compatible with the rest of the left in Greece since he is pro EU and everyone else is anti EU, but he quit Syriza and then he decided he's gonna make his own party with a fucking expiration date for some weird reason, instead of doing some self crit and trying to figure out how to work together with the huge number of leftist orgs and parties in the country.
Here is the issue in Greece: there is a communist party called KKE which is bad for a number of reasons but it is historically important and has been in the Parliament since forever, there was Syriza which was getting very low percentages until it just blew up after the financial crisis, which eventually ended up with them winning the elections and then going to shit, and there is a bunch of other leftist parties and organisations which have a huge presence in universities and also some work places, but do very poorly electorally. Why do they do so poorly? It is at least partly because the radical left, while there is people who support it, is very fragmented.
Say you want to vote for a radical leftist party in Greece. You can chose between ANTARSYA (a coalition of a bunch of different organisations), or Laiki Enotita (Popular Unity, another coalition of different orgs), or you can go even smaller and vote KKE-ML which is a different party from both KKE and ML-KKE (I'm serious). Not to mention all the other weird shit with 5 voters each. This creates great confusion which, combined with the severe lack of visibility in the media (since they are not in parliament) ensures we keep failing to meet the 3% threshold required to enter parliament.
Enter Varoufakis. Varoufakis has great name recognition. Also he is kind of a lib so he's not hard to stomach for progressive libs. He was what a certain subset of the voters of Syriza used to vote Syriza for, so it was easy for him to scoop up disaffected Syriza voters. His name recognition also means that a lot of the confused people who can't figure out what leftist to vote for were immediately directed to him out of desperation. But Varoufakis did not try once to collaborate with and talk to someone else, because he just wanted to be chief of some party sitting in Parliament. So he just storms in, barely meets the 3% threshold and then tries to pretend he is doing something for the people by constantly calling the manager of capitalism to make him stop being nasty.
I mentioned earlier how the radical leftist orgs fail to enter parliament. However this doesn't mean they lack in presence. Like, we succeed in gathering large crowds of people for protests, closing down workplaces, universities, schools etc and blocking various decisions by the government. On the other hand, Varoufakis not only fails to do any of these things, he almost seems to "snub" these practices and regard them as outdated or whatever. Apparently online ads and talking about how he angrily called some minister was what made him stop doing something bad is better. But it doesn't stop there. Occasionally he also says some outright reactionary and confused shit that just serves to bolster the hegemony of the right, and has ended up with him losing quite a bit of the support he used to have. Like, why does he feel the need to say what a cool economist he thinks the fucking neoliberal finance minister of the current right wing conservative government is? Why does he trash the "lawlessness" in universities while the government is trying to take away the very important protection against cops entering campuses that has been in law for decades now? The absolute peak of his liberalism was when he went on TV and said that as a marxist he believes class struggle should be put on hold while the pandemic is raging because both the poor and the rich are losing money (!). Like, just complete baby brain shit.
Oh, btw, he is one of the richest and bougiest people in the Greek Parliament (both because of the money he made himself and the money that came from his faildaughter wife who hails from some mega bougie family) which is weird when you try to sell yourself as some sort of proletarian leader. His wife literally inspired the song "Common People" by Pulp which just describes everything you have to know about her, him, and a lot of their voters too.
I didn't say everything though. There are even more important and subtler reasons why he's not very good which have to do with his political and economical program but I am neither knowledgeable nor willing enough to discuss that right now because it's a big convo...
He resigned when his party did not accept the results of the referendum on austerity and opted to be further indebted to Brussels, against everything he fought for. He was betrayed by his party and left accordingly.
Anybody remember how quickly this guy sold everybody out as soon as Syriza got voted in. This guy is the worst spokesman for anything and it's telling that he's now gonna be an important traveling leftie Face. Reminds me of the CIA vs CIA Chomsky vs Buckley debate.
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Call me an absolutist, but the whole Eurozone project is an antidemocratic death star. And though he's not an obvious toad like Tsipras, I remember seeing a headline like this and thinking, "Wow, there never really was any hope, was there." That he gracefully pirouetted away with his "lefty creds" intact still bothers me.
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It was Varoufkis's insistence in staying in the EU that gave away the game and still does, not how he behaved at one particular moment. I remember the Naked Capitalism bunch pushed this guy hard during the Greek crisis. And Naked Capitalism is pretty lib once you scratch the surface. All arguements end with "Eurozone good!" He was given to the greeks (and now the rest of us) to explicitly NOT give them what they wanted, much like the rest of our political class. But this one talks good.............
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I wasn't gonna reply after my initial comment was blasted. I did have to refresh my memory just to make sure I wasn't just being a contrarian asshole -but yeah- I remember now. Then a few posters showed up with a frame of reference larger than the last two years. So thank you for that.
Can you expand on this? I was under the impression Yanis was somewhat based. Is he bad?
I'm also interested in whatever this criticism is because Yanis even has a critical support take on China which is saying something of any leftist public figure in the current climate.
He is bad but not really for the reasons this person brought up. Varoufakis did resign when Syriza trashed the result of the referendum, as did many other people. But he is bad for a multitude of reasons surrounding both his political and economical analysis, and for his absolute shit attitude towards the rest of the left (I'll get to what I mean in a while) and his lib brain. I mean, it's not like his views would be super compatible with the rest of the left in Greece since he is pro EU and everyone else is anti EU, but he quit Syriza and then he decided he's gonna make his own party with a fucking expiration date for some weird reason, instead of doing some self crit and trying to figure out how to work together with the huge number of leftist orgs and parties in the country.
Here is the issue in Greece: there is a communist party called KKE which is bad for a number of reasons but it is historically important and has been in the Parliament since forever, there was Syriza which was getting very low percentages until it just blew up after the financial crisis, which eventually ended up with them winning the elections and then going to shit, and there is a bunch of other leftist parties and organisations which have a huge presence in universities and also some work places, but do very poorly electorally. Why do they do so poorly? It is at least partly because the radical left, while there is people who support it, is very fragmented.
Say you want to vote for a radical leftist party in Greece. You can chose between ANTARSYA (a coalition of a bunch of different organisations), or Laiki Enotita (Popular Unity, another coalition of different orgs), or you can go even smaller and vote KKE-ML which is a different party from both KKE and ML-KKE (I'm serious). Not to mention all the other weird shit with 5 voters each. This creates great confusion which, combined with the severe lack of visibility in the media (since they are not in parliament) ensures we keep failing to meet the 3% threshold required to enter parliament.
Enter Varoufakis. Varoufakis has great name recognition. Also he is kind of a lib so he's not hard to stomach for progressive libs. He was what a certain subset of the voters of Syriza used to vote Syriza for, so it was easy for him to scoop up disaffected Syriza voters. His name recognition also means that a lot of the confused people who can't figure out what leftist to vote for were immediately directed to him out of desperation. But Varoufakis did not try once to collaborate with and talk to someone else, because he just wanted to be chief of some party sitting in Parliament. So he just storms in, barely meets the 3% threshold and then tries to pretend he is doing something for the people by constantly calling the manager of capitalism to make him stop being nasty.
I mentioned earlier how the radical leftist orgs fail to enter parliament. However this doesn't mean they lack in presence. Like, we succeed in gathering large crowds of people for protests, closing down workplaces, universities, schools etc and blocking various decisions by the government. On the other hand, Varoufakis not only fails to do any of these things, he almost seems to "snub" these practices and regard them as outdated or whatever. Apparently online ads and talking about how he angrily called some minister was what made him stop doing something bad is better. But it doesn't stop there. Occasionally he also says some outright reactionary and confused shit that just serves to bolster the hegemony of the right, and has ended up with him losing quite a bit of the support he used to have. Like, why does he feel the need to say what a cool economist he thinks the fucking neoliberal finance minister of the current right wing conservative government is? Why does he trash the "lawlessness" in universities while the government is trying to take away the very important protection against cops entering campuses that has been in law for decades now? The absolute peak of his liberalism was when he went on TV and said that as a marxist he believes class struggle should be put on hold while the pandemic is raging because both the poor and the rich are losing money (!). Like, just complete baby brain shit.
Oh, btw, he is one of the richest and bougiest people in the Greek Parliament (both because of the money he made himself and the money that came from his faildaughter wife who hails from some mega bougie family) which is weird when you try to sell yourself as some sort of proletarian leader. His wife literally inspired the song "Common People" by Pulp which just describes everything you have to know about her, him, and a lot of their voters too.
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I didn't say everything though. There are even more important and subtler reasons why he's not very good which have to do with his political and economical program but I am neither knowledgeable nor willing enough to discuss that right now because it's a big convo...
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I could have sworn he resigned when Syriza went to shit
He resigned when his party did not accept the results of the referendum on austerity and opted to be further indebted to Brussels, against everything he fought for. He was betrayed by his party and left accordingly.
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