Book review: Is 'Adults in the Room' by Yanis Varoufakis one of the greatest political memoirs ever?
One of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written
'Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice. In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written..'
NB: “The key to such power networks is exclusion and opacity” The criminal core of modern capitalism needs to be studied without blinkers. And I am no apologist for the crimes committed in the name of socialism.. DS
'Elected politicians have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or compromise to our desire for social justice. In this book, then, Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern power ever written..'
NB: “The key to such power networks is exclusion and opacity” The criminal core of modern capitalism needs to be studied without blinkers. And I am no apologist for the crimes committed in the name of socialism.. DS
Yanis Varoufakis - Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment
Reviewed by Paul Mason
Yanis Varoufakis once
bought me a gin and tonic. His wife once gave me a cup of tea. While dodging my
questions, as finance ministers are obliged to, he never once told me an
outright lie. And I’ve hosted him at two all-ticketed events. I list these
transactions because of what I am about to say: that Varoufakis has written one
of the greatest political memoirs of all time. It stands alongside Alan
Clark’s for frankness, Denis
Healey’s for attacks on former allies, and – as a manual for exploring the
perils of statecraft – will probably gain the same stature as Robert
Caro’s biography of Lyndon B Johnson.
Yet Varoufakis’s
account of the crisis that has scarred Greece between 2010 and today also
stands in a category of its own: it is the inside story of high politics told
by an outsider. Varoufakis began on the outside – both of elite politics and
the Greek far left – swerved to the inside, and then abruptly abandoned it,
after he was sacked by his former ally, Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras, in
July 2015. He dramatises his intent throughout the crisis with a telling
anecdote. He’s in Washington for a meeting with Larry Summers, the former US
treasury secretary and Obama confidant. Summers asks him point blank: do you
want to be on the inside or the outside? “Outsiders prioritise their freedom to
speak their version of the truth. The price is that they are ignored by the
insiders, who make the important decisions,” Summers warns.
Elected politicians
have little power; Wall Street and a network of hedge funds, billionaires and
media owners have the real power, and the art of being in politics is to
recognise this as a fact of life and achieve what you can without disrupting
the system. That was the offer. Varoufakis not only rejected it – by describing
it in frank detail now, he is arming us against the stupidity of the left’s
occasional fantasies that the system built by neoliberalism can somehow bend or
compromise to our desire for social justice.
In this book, then,
Varoufakis gives one of the most accurate and detailed descriptions of modern
power ever written – an achievement that outweighs his desire for
self-justification during the Greek crisis. He explains, with a weariness born
of nights in soulless hotels and harsh-lit briefing rooms, how the modern power
network is built. Aris gets a loan from Zorba’s bank; Zorba writes off the loan
but Zorba’s construction company gets a contract from Aris’s ministry. Aris’s
son gets a job at Zorba’s TV station, which for some reason is always bankrupt
and so can never pay tax – and so on.
“The key to such power
networks is exclusion and opacity,” Varoufakis writes. As sensitive information
is bartered, “two-person alliances forge links with other such alliances …
involving conspirators who conspire de facto without being conscious
conspirators”. In the process of telling this story, Varoufakis not only spills
the beans but beans of the kind the Greeks call gigantes – fat
ones, full of juice.
The first revelation
is that not only was Greece bankrupt
in 2010 when the EU bailed it out, and that the bailout was designed to save
the French and German banks, but that Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy knew
this; and they knew it would be a disaster. This charge is not new
– it was levelled at the financial elite at the time by leftwing activists and
rightwing economists. But Varoufakis substantiates it with quotes – some
gleaned from the tapes of conversations and phone calls he was, unbeknown to
the participants, making at the time.
Even now, two years
after the last Greek election, this is of more than academic interest. Greece
remains burdened by billions of euros of debt it cannot pay. Because of the
actions taken in 2010-11 – saving private banks by saddling north European
states with massive debts – it is French and German taxpayers who will pay the
price when the Greek debt is inevitably written off.
The second revelation
is that close members of Varoufakis’s family were threatened with violence
when, with the masses in control of the streets and squares, he began to line
up with those denouncing the initial bailout as unworkable. It was in response
to these threats – delivered via an anonymous phone call with oligarchic calm –
that Varoufakis says he left Greece for the US. As a result, on his
return, as he swung towards active support of the radical left party Syriza, Varoufakis
experienced the unfolding crisis as an outsider in a different sense. When
asked to speak to the crowd occupying Syntagma
Square in May-June 2011, he recalls: “The last time I addressed a
demonstration was in Nottinghamshire, at a picket line during the 1984 miners’
strike.”
He was about to join a
cadre of leftwing political operatives – headed by Tsipras, flanked by his
Glasgow-educated chief of staff Nikos Pappas – in a fight to the finish with
neoliberalism. But he had scant experience of the organised Greek left and was
viewed by many among them as a neoliberal himself.Varoufakis’s academic
achievements had been in the application of game theory to economics. So when
he designed Syriza’s confrontation strategy, he was explicit: the enemy had to
believe Syriza was
prepared to default, or cut loose from the euro system – enough to persuade the
EU powers to roll over loans that were coming due, and to deter them from
triggering the collapse of the Greek banking system.
This worked – although
at the price of a big rhetorical climbdown and retreat on Syriza’s domestic
programme in February 2015. It failed in July because, having fought and won an
emotional referendum campaign, Tsipras chose compromise over the prospect of a
rerun of the Greek civil war.
I interviewed Varoufakis on the
night of that referendum victory. He seemed stunned by its size (he admits in
the book he expected to lose) and certain that it would hand Tsipras the
ammunition to face down the so-called troika of lenders. It is now clear,
however, that both men miscalculated.
Varoufakis understood – on the authority
of the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble – that Germany would not try
to force Greece out of the euro. By the time it did exactly this, two weeks of
closed banks and collapsing growth had made the stakes of the game all or
nothing. Getting sacked left
Varoufakis with a clean skin – although the price has been self-imposed exile
once again from active politics in Greece. If, as is possible, the situation
spirals towards economic doom, his voice – together with those of veteran
anti-euro communists who split from Syriza – may be all that remains to rally
the left for a last-ditch fight against fascism and dictatorship.
But I continue to
believe Tsipras was right to climb down in the face of the EU’s ultimatum, and
that Varoufakis was at fault for the way he designed the “game” strategy. For
Tsipras – and for the older generation of former detainees and torture victims
who rebuilt the Greek left after 1974 – staying in power as a dented shield
against austerity was preferable to handing power back to a bunch of political
mafiosi backed by a mob of baying rich-kid fashionistas.
In the end, Tsipras’s
government proved a not very effective shield for the Greek working class, but
an effective protection for the million-plus Syrian migrants who landed on
Greek shores in the weeks following the economic surrender. The Greek armed
forces, judiciary and riot police are replete with people who would have gladly
seen the rubber dinghies sunk, their surviving occupants rounded up, interned
on landing and deported en masse.
Though Syriza’s
handling of the mass migration has been at times inept, at the crucial moment –
from July to December 2015 – left-led Greece provided a conduit and a haven for
people fleeing terror and destruction. A right-conservative government would
have given a very different and much nastier welcome to the Syrians. In this context,
Varoufakis’s version of the Tsipras story needs to be challenged. Varoufakis
alleges that Tsipras is prone to frivolity, melancholy and indecision, and that
he is determined to prove he is “no shooting star”. But unlike Varoufakis,
Tsipras built a party capable of crushing the elite politicians who have
drained Greece of wealth and credibility for a generation, and of governing.
Tsipras – together with his aide Pappas, whom Varoufakis describes correctly as
a major influence on events – built something that he calculated could survive
defeat.
Varoufakis built a
reputation, but not a party. Indeed the world of parties – of activists huddled
against the rainy windows of suburban cafes, of leaflet drops, of strikes and
anti-fascist demos – is absent from this memoir. If the global left –
which was on a roll during 2011-2013 – is to regain momentum, it needs leaders
like Tsipras to find thinkers and doers like Varoufakis, and to nurture them.
But above all it needs to talk to the mass of people in language born out of
the years of toil it takes to build a party and a movement.
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