The West Is collapsing under its own lies | Yanis Varoufakis | UNAPOLOGETIC

I consider Trump to be a clear and present danger for civilization. But I am a gasast when I see liberals dismiss him as a buffoon who doesn't know what what he's doing. They are, you know, politicians that are running around like decapitated chickens, not knowing what's going on. The only people who have a plan are the Chinese. What do you think the consequences of this facade dropping are going to be? The global south is where I source my hope these days. The genocide has been financed and armed by Biden, by the Democrats, by the German

government, by the French government, by the Italian government, by the European Union. I'd never expected them to be so blatant in the ease with which they were destroying the very concept of, you know, the rule of law in Europe. What do you think drives this liberal blind spot? A mixture of stupidity and nastiness. Have you been busy? Yes. Yes. Trump is is keeping all of us be very busy. Um, it's non-stop. Hi, good day and welcome to another episode of Unapologetic. Today I'm joined by Januz Farufakis. Januz, good to have you on the show. It's

excellent to be on your show. Thank you so much. Januz Farafakis is probably no stranger to many of our audiences. He's a I mean he's a politician, an activist, an economist, uh a former uh finance minister of Greece, uh and sharply known for his criticisms of Western society. Um the way Western society and Western powers have been conducting themselves. Jiannis, it's real pleasure having you on the show. Um we plan today to speak about sort of what you've been calling the decay of of Western society. I mean, it's not even the decay. I mean, you've

kind of always been talking about how the West has this mask. We're going to be uncovering that, but specifically through the prism of Gaza, the West response to Gaza, through Ukraine, uh the climate crisis, and obviously now with sort of all the economic upheavalss and other upheavalss through through writists coming coming into power, specifically Donald Trump. So, good to have you on the show. Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Just to begin with, I mean, uh you like I've mentioned, you have been a fierce critic of sort of Western intervention. um the

way western powers have sort of flexed their economic tools and sort of this imagined sense of and sometimes imagined sometimes not so imagined I guess the sense of moral superiority that the west has Gandhi once said that the western about western civilization that it would be a great idea what's your response to that I always plagiarize him when people ask me their opinion about the European Union I say well it would be a great idea we don't have a European a European disunion similarly and I believe that Gandhi didn't say this about western civilization. He

talked he talked about British civilization. That's one thing from the Indian perspective. Look, I am very happy more than happy to celebrate the accomplishments of the west when it comes to letters, sciences, um basic ideas about human rights and so on. In the same way that I consider the achievements of every civilization, the Chinese civilization, the Indian civilization, African civilizations, I consider every civilization's accomplishments to be my accomplishments, my heritage. But uh in times when a particular block empire call it civilization if you wish um it dominates and um essentially through its dominance undermines the

capacity of humanity to prosper. We need to turn our attention far more critically on the dominant culture uh and to expose its inongruities, its um hypocrisy uh the crimes against humanity that it perpetuates. And you know for the last centuries it's been the West. So when people today say to me, but how can we tolerate here in Europe what's happening in Gaza? Well, my cynical answer is we've done it before. Europe is responsible for um the genocide of the natives, the first nations in the Americas, in Australia, let's not forget in New Zealand, in Kenya,

in South Africa, in Namimia. Um there is a long trail of corpses of genocides of genocidal behavior which is you know one of the reasons why we have great cathedrals and great universities. You know they were funded through the slave trade. They were funded through empire. You know you go to Brussels which is the capital of the European Union. most of it um was built on the basis of the slave economy that they built on the back of the people of the Congo. So there's no sense in uh celebrating the good things without exposing all

the crimes on which they have been founded. You mentioned sort of the the awful and histo like horrible history of and legacy of colonialism. Um there's I mean is it is it just a sense of perhaps we are we we we sort of give psychologically we give a sense to to the here and now but there is the sense that the mask is kind of slipping why do you think that so do you think that's more because of global dynamics and global power shifts and more people sort of feel that they have a voice now

or do you think there's something just particularly pungent in the tone that's sort of been going on in the last four or five years and also honestly we'll get to Gaza later but but I mean it's just like it just seems like this maskoff moment what's why is that So well 2008 was our generation's 1929. Capitalism had two moments uh when it nearly fa faced extinction. 1929 was one of them. 2008 was the other. 1929 was overcome in the end through the second world war which uh revived capital accumulation in the capitalist west. it shifted

from Britain to the United States. Uh and uh through this tectonic shift, it revived itself for another 80 years or so, 70 years. Uh in order to continue to uh be hijonic, Americanbased capitalism uh did something remarkable in the 1970s. Essentially, if you think about it, the British Empire collapsed because eventually once it became a deficit economy and after it stopped being able to finance these deficits through India and through Malaysia through plan the plunder of Asia uh at some point collapsed. But this and this is absolutely a defining point about our era. The United

States after the late 1960s when it too became a deficit economy, it managed to do something that had never been done by any empire in the past. Not the British Empire, not the Dutch Empire, not the Spanish Empire, not the Roman Empire. It rebuilt and grew its hijgemony by becoming a very bankrupt country by going deeper into the red and by making uh the rest of the world's capitalists effectively pay for its deficits because this is what exactly what's been happening since the 1970s. So you have a new model of a Germany where strength grows

not on surpluses but on deficits because of the power of the dollar. The Americans use their trade deficit, the American ruling class, not the people of America who suffer just as much as the rest of the world from this transformation of the United States into a deficit country. The American trade deficit, which Trump talks about now as something that he needs to shrink. But nevertheless, the American trade deficit by growing it operated like a huge vacuum cleaner that was sucking into the United States the net exports of Germany, of Japan, of uh Southeast Asia and

later of China. And who was paying for this deficit? Well, the capitalists from these countries, France, Germany, Japan, China, Korea and so on, they sent their dollars that they were making from the United States market because of the US trade trade deficit they were making. They were sending it back to the United States to finance the American state, the American army, American finance and American real estate. So between the 1970s and 2008, that was the model of American hijgemony. That was a globalization. what people refer to as globalization. That's what it was. It was the

American ruling class turning itself into a reeer class using the trade deficit to keep the rest of the world's capitalists going while the rest of the world's capitalist sending their loot back to New York. Okay. on the back of this tsunami of money that was going back to New York, the Wall Street bankers built up these humongous derivatives, the those toxic um financial products that Warren Buffett once described as weapons of mass financial destruction and those exploded in 2008 and the whole thing nearly died. American capitalism and global capital was saved by two forces or

two institutions if you want. China that upped the ante that increased production and invested massively to prop up the global system and by the Federal Reserve, the central banks, Bank of America and all the other European central banks and the central bank of Japan that minted $35 trillion in order to save capitalism. But you know when you combine this huge flow of money, printed money with austerity for the majority of people in America, in Europe, this combination of austerity and huge quantities of money, it operates like cortisone to a cancer patient. It makes you feel

the patient feels more aity reasonably well, but the cancer is doing its nasty business underneath the skin. And after 15 years of this, since 2008, uh, with Obama and the Democrats totally betraying the people that entrusted them, that voted them in, uh, essentially that was the reason why Trumpism was created. And therefore this stagnating capitalism after 2008 uh aided and abetted by arrive the rise of a new form of capital in big tech which I call cloud capital that lives in the cloud the proverbial cloud it's not in the cloud it's on earth and it's

in the oceans you know optic fiber cables um our iPads and uh mobile phones and cell towers and algorithms and AI high uh bots and all that. All this has spelled the end of what we knew as capitalism. This is what I said in my last book. Uh we have a new system in my estimation. I call it technofedalism. Um it's a stage after capitalism. It's far worse than capitalism even. And it is a system which produces political fragmentation. it um has fewer capacities to replicate itself than even capitalism had. And therefore, and this was

my long-winded answer to your very succinct question, it creates this um sensation that the West is finished. But you know, it's like a a wounded dragon. The more wounded it is, the more it rushes around about and the more dangerous it is for the people living within the West and primarily the people of the global south. You mentioned technofudalism. It's also what you mentioned is in your book and you talk about how I mean you did mention in your answer that capitalism's kind of died in 2008 and I'm I'm guessing what you're saying is that

since then there's been the birth of technofudalism. Yeah. How do you think how is Trump's sort of policies on tariffs which I think is a mixture of Trump you know it's a mixture of MAGA uh it's a mixture of short-sightedness. It's a mixture of possibly uh trying to assist uh you know speaking to his base but also speaking to the technofudo lords. Do you think it's going to be successful? Um and and what do you think sort of do you think he's going to give up on it? Do you think he's going to put his

foot down more depending on what happens in the markets? Where do you think it's he's going to he's going to land us? I think it's a mistake to focus as much as he does on tariffs because for his people his team and remember his team is more important than him in the same way that uh you know the the the the last 50 years globalization neoliberalism all that was a result of another president who shocked the world that was President Nixon who in 1971 appended you know effectively disintegrated destroyed the postworld order that the Americans

had created the it was actually far more uh poignant and if you want aggressive what he did what Nixon did but Nixon was not that much of an intellectual if you asked him exactly what he was trying to do um he probably would have uh not been very coherent but the people around him Henry Kissinger John Connelly his treasury secretary and Paul Vulkar who then later became became the chairman of the Fed, they knew exactly what they were doing. And if you read their texts and their um their speeches and the minutes of their discussions

1969 and 1970, you could see exactly what they were doing. Why am I saying that? Because we should not emphasize too much Trump. Trump has a team around him. He's a frontman. So there's Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, similarly to John Connelly, who was the Treasury Secretary of Nixon. He's got uh Steven Miran behind him. He's got uh a number of people who know exactly what they're doing and if you read what they're saying for them tariffs are just a tool. They're a means to an end. They're not the essence of it. Uh as far

as they are concerned and I think that Trump also thinks that way uh the intention is to bring them down at some point. the project of the Trump team, the purpose and the intention of the Trump shock, which as I said is an attempt to revive the Nixon shock of 50 years ago. Uh they are very clear on what they want to do. They want to devalue the dollar while maintaining the dollar's dominance. Now that sounds like a contradiction, but it is not because Nixon did that. Nixon devalued the dollar massively in 1971 after the

15th of August 1971. massive devaluation of the dollar but through devaluing it he created the circumstances for the dollar to become more hegemonic and more dominant as a world's currency than ever now the Trump team are fearful they worry that the dollar may lose its hegemony and what they want to do is they want to bring its value down in relation to its exchange rate visa v the the pound the yen the one the euro and so on they want to bring it down by around 30% while at the same time forcing those foreigners who

have lots of dollars whether they are central banks or privateeers uh to sell their dollars but not to buy the one the Chinese currency not to buy the yen the Japanese currency not to buy the euro to maintain their hijgemony so is this plan going to work I don't know who knows if this was a conversation we're having 1971 would we be able to predict whether the Nixon shock would work no way no one can make this prediction But to dismiss the Trump team as a bunch of neanderals, which is what the liberal establishment is

doing both in the United States and in Europe. If you read the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, they dismiss them as a bunch of idiots. Um, this is a major error. It's the same error they made in 1971 against Nixon. So, if you ask me, will it work? I don't think it will work. But we should take very seriously what their intention is and we should differentiate between the means and the ends. The tariffs are not the ends, they are the means. He's putting them up there as a bargaining chip in order to convince

different countries to do different things. He doesn't want the rest of us to do the same thing. He wants each one of us to do a different thing. So when it comes to the Japanese, for instance, the Japanese have $1.2 trillion in savings. He wants them to sell them and he wants them to buy very longdated low interest rate American debt. He wants them to buy crypto, especially tether or some stable coin which is linked to the United States dollar because if they do that they are selling dollars. The dollar goes down but what they're

doing is they are putting the money into a US dollar denominated asset which then is covered by buying you know tether buys 30 year old 30-y year long dated US treasuries. So they have a plan, right? Who doesn't have a plan? Europe, the United Kingdom. They are, you know, politicians that are running around like decapitated chickens, not knowing what's going on. The only people who have a plan are the Chinese uh and some other countries like South Korea and Vietnam who are far more in tune what is happening. I consider Trump to be a clear

and present danger for civilization. But I am a gasast when I see liberals in particular liberals liberal opponents of Trump uh dismiss him as a buffoon who doesn't know what what he's doing. This is a very dangerous uh form of complacency. Okay. So you're speaking about about a bunch of things there and obviously I want to I want to ask you and maybe I'll ask you later and what does if if Trump's policies sort of win. We've been discussing if you like work but who they work for and who they they don't work for because

I think that's important. But sort of let's talk about this liberal blind spot and this liberal short-sightedness and uh we are Middle East so obviously we spend a lot of time covering Israel and Palestine as you probably know and there seems to be the exact same liberal short-sightedness in the with the situation there. Um, and then there's also the same sort of there's outrage over, you know, if Trump I mean, and I'm no fan of Trump and I think he's a danger to civilization as you do, but if Trump sort of shares a video on

on X AI video taking over Gaza, there's there's liberal outcry, but if Biden provides $20 trillion, $20 billion worth of of arms to uh to to Israel, then there isn't the same amount of outcry. What do you think drives this liberal blind spot? A mixture of stupidity and nastiness. Because let's face it, as you said, the genocide has been financed and armed by Biden, by the Democrats, by the German government, by the French government, by the Italian government, by the European Union. The liberal establishment is primarily responsible for the genocide of the Palestinians have been

fors now, right? They wax lyrical about the two-state solution. If you push them about their complicity to the genocide, that is the liberals, the centrists, they say, "Yeah, but we support the two-state solution." Well, this is simply something they say in order to cover up for their complicity in the genocide because they are arming the man who has spent his whole life that is Netanyahu, destroying any possibility of a two-state solution. And while arming him to destroy the possibility of a two-state solution, the liberal centers in the United States and the European Union have been

proclaiming the two-state solution right between you and I. And I hope this is not taken out of context. I prefer Trump because Trump says, "Okay, now what is the logic of arming Netanyahu that he's going to kill every Palestinian there is or expel them, the ones who who have survived and have haven't died of bullet wounds or drone attacks or starvation or thirst, right? So what happens then? We have a big empty land in Gaza. Okay, I'm going to take it over and I'm going to build my Trump land there and I am going to

celebrate this with my friend Netanyahu. It is he is far more honest and logically coherent than all these supposedly nice sweet centrists who've been talking about a two-state solution but have been complicit in the total annihilation of any chance of a two-state solution. I mean a lot of reason why I mean we're probably having this discussion we probably would have spoken to you because you know you're a very well-known person anyway but a lot of discussions you have had and the discussions we've had as a news organization and others we having these discussions to a

large extent because of because of October 7th um irrespective of of of Trump coming into power etc right um and yes as you mentioned in your first answer about the colonial legacy and even now the fact that there's been this liberal mask the mask of all western powers have kind of existed on Palestine for 75 years. So it it wasn't shocking that post October 7th, Israel's brutality was going to be quite quite obvious, going to be quite overt, and that they'd be given rope by Western powers to sort of do what what they were going

to do. But even so, do you are you surprised by the extent of the destruction by the response uh by the crackdown on civil liberties in Western countries as a result? Like even though you kind of knew and expected there'll be, you know, atrocities that are now going to be committed, are you still surprised by the extent and and the level of those atrocities? No, I'm not at all surprised. It is utterly consistent with everything that has been happening in Palestine since the Ragba, since 1948. The u doctrine of the Israeli aparttheid state has been

consistent. We will kill a 100 people for everyone of our soldiers or settlers uh who is impeded from carrying out the ethnic cleansing. They've been remarkably stable in this in this pursuit. uh if I am surprised by something I have to say and that's because of my naive it was for instance when uh in o in April of 2024 uh the German authorities banned me from entering uh Germany even by Zoom even by the medium that you and I are using today to discuss. I have to tell you that I never expected them to be

so blatant in the ease with which they were destroying the very concept of you know the rule of law in Europe. I was expecting them to be more careful when it came to uh jeopardizing the facade of um a Europe that is rulesbound. Banning a member a member a citizen of the European Union from traveling to Germany because he doesn't support the genocide of Palestinians. Uh and banning him too um electronically. I have to tell you that this was beyond the limits of my imagination. Uh, it more or less entertained me because I realized that

there must be particularly stressed by the subconscious. There must be only a subconscious guilt over their complicity to the genocide. They simply are in denial. So they they like like toddlers that like toddlers throwing a tantrum. our European leaders are behaving with such uh want disrespect to the rules which supposedly ought to govern their behavior which they have waxed lyricical about you know for decades now that I have to say surprised me to some extent uh it doesn't mean that the Israeli atrocities the genocide the the fact that they've placed two million people on death

row and nobody's lifting an eyelid or a little finger to do about it about something about this in in amongst the the governing elites. That did not surprise me. It doesn't mean that it doesn't absolutely disgust me. It doesn't mean that I don't lose sleep over the fact that I have to live in a Europe that is governed by people who you know bathe the buildings of the European Union in the Ukrainian flag in the flag of you know Israel as Israel is performing a genocide. It is, you know, it is it is simultaneously utterly

expected and utterly soul destroying. What do you think? I mean, you you mentioned mainly that there's this there's this facade that's dropped and it's you mentioned in Europe and it's obviously it's dropping off in the United States as well with all of sort of the the persecution almost of of young students throughout campuses and others. What do you think the consequences of this facade dropping are going to be? Well, already we have seen people self-censor on a number of issues because you see the the Palestinian question, the Palestinian issue, the Palestinian genocide is the great

moral clarifier of our times. Anyone who turns a blind eye to what's happening in Palestine today, whether they live in Berlin, in Stoutgart, in Paris, in Dublin, in Britain, it doesn't matter in Athens. anyone who is not aware but frightened of being denounced if they don't denounce propalistian demonstrators for instance they lose their soul and I don't this I don't mean this in a fully spiritual or even a religious sense I'm an atheist but what I mean is that it is very hard for them to then resist any abuse of power when it comes to

um the rights of women, when it comes to rights of workers, when it comes to their own municipalities right to maintain decent services in their region. You see, it cascades. Once you turn a blind eye to what's happening in Palestine, then your capacity for ethically resisting any wrong, any injustice that which is done in your own circle, in your own society, in your own region, in your own country across Europe simply dissipates in exactly the same way that if if this was 1938 and it was a day after Crystal N when the Jews were um

attacked and uh petrolbombed and um killed uh and harassed in Berlin in throughout Germany. Anyone who turned a blind eye to the persecution of the Jews after crystal 1938 lost their capacity to resist injustice at any real in any sense of the way. This is how fascism takes hold of a society. One moral clarifying issue is enough in order to start this domino effect and the result is a society which is completely um indefensible cannot be defended by its own members uh when uh when the fascists come knocking at the door. So I mean you've

spoken it's definitely that that that trend and we see that that move towards fascism but I mean like any sort of clampdown there's also push back right and we've seen push back we've seen large demonstrations there's increasingly a young generation who completely is out of touch or I mean I'd rather say the the older generation is out of touch with how young people feel government elites throughout the world feel differently and I think this is all built on the on on on the backbone of the fact that you know at the turn of the of

of the millennium year 2000 the EU US and UK plus mine has generated about 60% of the world GDP. Now it's closer to about 40%. So the world's also shifting to power is also shifting to China and India but also former colonized uh places. So what do you think of push back and also I mean at the same time there's also larger non-white populations nonJudeo-Christian populations in Europe, the US and the UK. Um, so how do you sort of see this interplay between this tent towards fascism, but at the same time this demographic and power

shift away from, you know, the colonial powers of the the 19th and 20th centuries? Well, the global south is where I source my hope these days, not Europe, not the United States. Let me be frank on this. I take my hat off to the young people particularly, but not only young people, uh to young people, to Jewish comrades who went out on the street, who demonstrated for Palestine, who were beaten up by police, who were arrested, who were harassed, who lost their jobs. Many people lost their jobs. I have colleagues of mine in Germany, from

our party, Maran 25 there who lost their jobs. uh I take my heart hat off to them and I'm very pleased that there is this push push back but allow me to be also critical of uh our own people myself included. Allow me in this context to draw a comparison between the protesters against the Vietnam war in the 1960s and the propalestinian pro protesters today in the United States and in Europe. Back then in 1968, 1969, 1970, the antivietnam war movement held this strong belief that if Vietnam frees itself from imperialism, from the United States

army occupation, that will be connected somehow to their own project in the United States, in France, in Germany, in Britain to liberate their own societies from oppression, from the capitalist yoke to put it in old-fashioned left-wing terms. There was this hope that the anti-imperialist war, the anti-imperialist campaign goes hand in hand with their own liberation. Today, that doesn't happen. the great boys and girls, men and women who um demonstrate in the campuses of the United States at the great risk to themselves as we have seen especially under Trump have no hope in their hearts or

minds that uh America will be liberated. Uh same here in Europe. The good people who demonstrate in Berlin, in Munich have been in many of those demonstrations. They are doing it for the Palestinians. This is fantastic. This is brilliant. But you know what? I lament the fact that they do not compare, not compare, connect the fight to liberate Palestine with a fight to liberate Munich, with a fight to liberate Brussels, with a fight to liberate the British working class from the yoke of the people who are actually keeping them down, not not leaving them behind,

but holding them down. And that works both ways. uh the fact that they don't hope anymore that we can liberate Europe uh means that our capacity to be helpful to the the cause of Palestinian liberation is uh circumscribed and vice versa. Uh however when I see similar movements, similar protesters in South Africa, in Namibia, in Malaysia, in um the whole of the of Latin America supporting the Palestinian cause, you can still see what used to be the case in the 1960s and early '7s in Europe and in the United States. You can still see that

these young people are connecting the Palestinian liberation struggle with their own liberation struggle. And I think that creates the feedback, the positive feedback effect between the local liberation struggle and the Palestinian liberation struggle which is good both for Palestine and for the global south. Okay. You also almost like answered my next question in as I as you were speaking. But I mean I want to I want to draw on it. So the first thing is why do you think there's this disconnect? Why do you think that that the young people protesting for Palestine in in

Western societies don't see the greater connect? Um and and I mean I assume we know why people in the south do. It's it's it's because I think they see the overt states oppression on upon them a lot more. But just why do you think there's this disconnected in Western societies? It's because the center left has betrayed us. The center left has betrayed progressive Europeans. uh when you see center-left or even radical left parties like the one I belong to and I was part of a government in Greece in 2015. Allow me to to to make

this very specific point but then I will expand it. on the 5th of July of 2015 after five tumultuous months when our people voted for people like me to clash with the powers that be with the forces of international finance uh the international mon gave us an amazing mandate to clash against them I was astounded it was extremely courageous of the voters of Greece to do this and they did it on the same day that 62% of them on the 5th of July 2015 gave us this cart blanch effectively to fight on their behalf um

unapologetically to use your own term um and defiantly on that day the very same day my prime minister called me in his office and he said this is time to surrender I said no this is not the time to surrender this is the time to fight and to honor this verdict so I ended up resigning that very same night same same Hey, within 10 hours he dispatched our foreign minister to Israel to sign the most contemptuous trade and particularly defense deal between Greece and Israel, effectively granting the IDF, the Israeli army, the right to maneuver

and to exercise in Greek airspace on Greek land without even the permission of the Greek state. So when the left does that uh and succumbs totally to the not only to the Zionist state but also to international finance to the European Central Bank and so on and in fact effectively sells out the people and this is a government that became a government that was voted in because of the support of the millions of young people out there who took immense personal risks to put us in government. So when they are betrayed then they lose hope.

Uh imagine if um every antic-colonial movement in the global south was to go into bed with Trumpists or with with with the Wall Street bankers or the fossil fuel industry, then I hope that never happens, but you you would see exactly the same process where the movements out there, young people uh no longer consider liberation to be possible or possibly in their lifetime. Okay. So, you've mentioned you see you see hope with with the global south. Right now, the big mover in the global south, well, the big one is China. And then I guess just

historically, it's not really part of the global south, but it's, you know, it's aligned with it's sort of been seen as anti-imperial, although it has its own imperial ambitions is Russia. Um, but generally speaking, it's not just a Chinese and Russian Russian problem. The problem I'm going to get to, and that's in most of these former colonized places, but specifically China and Russia because they're powerful, there are issues of, you know, lack of free speech. uh there's obviously problems with representative government there's I mean you know the problems there's there's no free media um people

are can be arbitrarily arrested etc so how does this then juxtapose with with your idea that that you see hope in the global south it is imperative that we do not place China and Russia in the same basket they are very different kettles of fish very different the collapse of the communist party in uh the Soviet Union which was very painful for people like me uh primarily because the working class of the Soviet Union did not rise up to support to defend a system which supposedly gave predominance to the working class which means that it

never really did give predominance to the working class. Uh and the result was that essentially you had regime change. uh you had the United States uh uh directing the wholesale privatization of the Soviet economy which meant that within days uh it became an ironclad oligarchy because when you give pieces of paper you know little shares for every corporation there was that was the chubai plan uh essentially giving tiny little portions of the ownership of the means of production to the people who are starving who can't put food on the table they will sell those pieces

of paper to the highest bidder so in the end 10 oligarchs bought the whole of the Soviet the former Soviet or Russian economy and you have an effectively an industrial feudalism an an oligarchy that was particularly fascistic in its behavior you had the rise of Putin and you had um the massacres of the church. You had um a a society where average life expectancy for men dropped from 77 years to 53. That has never happened even during the Second World War. So that's Russia. China is is totally different. There was no regime change in China.

Uh yes, you're completely right. I would suffocate in a regime where um I cannot um express my views. I cannot criticize the government. I can't criticize the president without fearing that you know that will disappear overnight. That to me as a radical democrat is unacceptable. But at the same time, China is a remarkable experiment in progress. Uh I've been there a number of times and what I see makes me very optimistic. Not fully optimistic but compared to other places I think that it is uh quite fascinating. On the one hand you are completely right. You

have um unacceptable limits on the on free speech. You have authoritarianism. You have people languishing in prison because uh of their beliefs. totally unacceptable stuff. But at the same time, if you go into any municipality in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, in um Wang Zoo, in Beijing, uh you you enter the municipality building, which I mean in these huge cities, the building is very large, believe me. And on the first floor there are all these conference rooms and you see there boisterous debates happening between uh citizens citizens assemblies within citizens assemblies. So there is a absolutely frenetic

boisterous local democracy happening in China which is unheard of in Europe and they do write legislation that governs their lives and their municipal. So at the level of the municipality in the region there is a lot more democracy in China today than there is in Europe or in the United States for that for that matter. Uh similarly similar at the in in in the same sense you have um housing which is increasingly socialized after 20 years of privatization. You have um a big tech sector which has been uh placed on a leash by a government

determined to minimize the exorbitant powers of the owners of uh applications and what I call cloud capital. You have um let me give you an example. They did away with private schooling and now you have a return of a remarkable public schooling system. uh there are huge clashes. I talk to people in China and the diversity of opinion is greater than it is in the United States or in Europe. So if you add to that the fact that China while very large and wanting to be influential is not an imperialist power. They have not started

a single war in the last 40 years unlike the United States, unlike the Europeans. uh and they really don't want to do that which the Soviet Communist Party used to want to do which is to um you know determine who's going to be the the president of Afghanistan and who is you know who's who should lead Ethiopia. The Chinese are really not interested in being interventionist at all in that sense. their relationship with the rest of the global south seems to be uh a a very um healthy one and a very openminded one. Uh maybe

sometimes too open-minded in the sense that they will not criticize dictatorial regimes because they don't want to be at all interventionist. But what I see with bricks pay and the various u uh attempts to create a monetary uh infrastructure that will give an opportunity to the rest of the global south to transact without going through the Federal Reserve without being um under the thumb of the United States imperialist uh forces and institutions. This is all a source of encouragement and I think that the rest of the global south um can and should take advantage of

the facilities that the Chinese are making available to them. Jiannis, we have we have I know you're a very busy man. We have 10 minutes left and I wanted to touch on a few things and so I'm going to ask you sort of a hyphenated question so that you can you can pace yourself accordingly uh about this. Right. So I mean the question I want to ask in essence is is where do you see the world being in 2035 right but I I mean the thing is we you need I mean you already have considered

but let's consider also the catastrophic effects of climate change and sort of the you know the absolute the ignorance that the sort of sleepwalking that that most governments are doing with regards that um you know Ukraine also gives us a very good case study for for really at the essence of it mismanagement on on m multiple sides Right. So when you consider what's happening in Ukraine, we've already talked about Gaza at length, um but also climate change and then you have this technofudalism developing in the west which I think is a good way of of

of capturing what's going on there and then the various currents in the global south and and China. Where do you think we're going to be sort of in 2035? Well, let me begin with Ukraine. Ukraine is ultimate proof uh of uh the dictim that it is very dangerous to be America's enemy, but it is even more dangerous to be America's friend. The Americans uh used Ukraine in order to keep Europe down, in order to uh essentially enable Putin to terrorize, rightly or wrongly in the minds of Europeans, the Europeans so much as to accept military

canism and the shift of uh scarce national income to completely useless uh armaments purchases. uh and of course to essentially take over Ukraine. You can see now with uh Trump's deal with uh Zalinski uh Ukraine has become a colony of the United States uh and it has lost bits and pieces of it to large one 20% of it to Putin's Russia. uh on the question of uh what I call technofidalism which I think is uh crucial. We have a new form of capital and this form of capital it differs from every other form of capital

that we had. You see every form of capital that we developed since time in memorial has been a produced means of production. something we produced like a fishing rod in order to produce something else, catching fish, you know, or a steam engine, you produce it in order to produce textiles, uh, or an industrial robot. You produce it in order to make cars. That's what capital always was, a produced means of production. But what leaves inside the screen when I'm talking to you what is connected to the to the cloud to the algorithms um the AI

bots and so on these are produced means but not of production they are produced means of behavioral modification. What these things do is modify our behavior. And anyone who owns this what I call cloud capital has direct power over us. And that is an exorbitant power, a power that Henry Ford never had, Rupert Murdoch never had, uh, no dictator ever had. And what it does it it it replaces markets with these uh digital fifoms or cloud fdoms like Amazon, like Uber, like Airbnb, which are not markets, they look like markets and they replace profits with

rents because let's face it, Jeff Bezos doesn't care what you purchase as long as you purchase through Amazon. And he charges 40% for everything you buy on Amazon. He doesn't produce any of that stuff. And that money comes out of the secular flow of income. It is highly destabilizing for the macroeconomy and also there are only two great locations for this cloud capital. It is the United States and China. That explains to a very large extent the new cold war between um uh the United States and China. And finally, climate change. It's not climate change

anymore. It's climate disaster. It's a climate catastrophe. Look, I don't want to uh darken your days or nights, whatever time it is that you're listening or watching this, but I fear that we have missed the boat as a species, that we are probably past the point of no no return. And even if we're not there yet, Trump is uh along with the liberal establishment. remember Biden subsidizing the fossil fuel industry as if there was no tomorrow. Uh they are um the west in particular is pushing humanity very fast towards that point of no return. Now

I despair at the thought especially for the global south because you know the powers that be will find ways of extending the lifespan of their families for another 100 years or so. They're occupying the higher uh plains. They have ways of mitigating the results of climate catastrophe and through their cloud capital they poison our conversation. So we can't even organize ourselves in order to end this vandalism on the planet because that's what Twitter does. That's what Instagram does. These algorithms are primed to extract more rents from us by making us angry so that we engage

with these apps these algorithms more. And the way that these apps understand this is essential to their existence as AI bots. The way that they can maximize the rents, the cloud rents of their owners is by poisoning our discussion, making it possible for us to have a discussion about a sensible discussion about the climate emergency. You know that all these forces are working together against the common interests of humanity. Now, we need to understand that before we do anything about it. Even if we are past the point of no return, we should struggle. We should

fight. We should organize. We should stop them because in the end, we'll all die anyway. So we might as well have some fun confronting the bar that be confronting Cloud Capital, confronting the Trumpists, confronting the liberal establishment that created the Trumpists and of course confronting the Israeli apartheite state which today is stigmatizing each and every one of us with a genocide that they're implementing in Gaza and in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Uh thank you. Final question. We still have about two or three minutes, but I mean you've mentioned sort of organizing and

and how we need to protest all of these things, right? But but in your mind, what does what what comes after that? what comes I mean obviously that will have to be an organic process and once people start protesting that that moves on and organizing but just in terms of structurally is there anything I mean it sounds like it's like protest and then from there there will be organization but is there what's the alternative to to to this very dark scenario that you've kind of painted in terms of climate change and technofilism well will you

allow me to plug another book of mine the previous book yes absolutely the only reason why I'm mentioning that is because you know it took me a decade before I I drumed up the courage in my soul to try to answer your question what's if you don't like this mate what's the alternative and the result was a science fiction novel which I called another now in which I try to imagine how the world could be today today with the technologies that we have with the um you know failed human psyches that we have how could

it be better today. Very briefly, I think we need three things. We need a lot of things, but in the short space of time I have, we need three things. Firstly, we need to organize production of value along the lines of the principle of one person, one employee, one share, one vote. The idea that some people own the companies in which we in which we work and that those who work do not own the companies. This is a preposterous idea that we have to do without. Secondly, we need to collectivize money. We need our monetary

systems not to belong to the bankers anymore because if you think about it in every major economy, 97% of the money is not produced by the central bank of the state. It is produced by private bankers. So for this we we need to promote a monetary common. So I've done a lot of work. I've explained this in that book. I've tried to explain it in other uh fora how we could have a monetary commerce and thirdly we need to have public green investment the market is never going to perform the green transition on its own

its incentives are all wrong it can never work we need to understand that wealth is produced collectively not individually and therefore it needs to be directed collectively in the uses which are consistent with the reproduction of our species. Janis Hakis, thank you so much for your time. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you.