There are people on youtube that have been talking about "letting the banks burn" and predicting the coming of CBDCs for years. I really appreciate Yiannis' views but I wonder why he hasn't talked much about this before.
2 years ago | 2
A society's culture is a product of its political system. Parliamentary democracies for example are more nationalistic and systems in which the executive can veto (2/3rds or absolute) the legislature - tend to be more universalist. Small things like electoral threshold, many electoral districts or a single nationwide el.d. , open or closed list pr. can have an enormous effect on a society's culture. Ancient Athens for example was nationalistic compared to ancient Rome (due to them both having a legislature they both had what Voltaire calls the public space) - because the consul or emperor could veto the senate and also issue edicts. In the middle ages kings, dukes, and lords governed through edicts and they needed the legilature only to approve their taxes. The culture of good manners in the early modern period was aso a product of this system. Culture however for 'all its might is quite fragile' and if you imagine that a nationalistic society had the following pol. system: the parliament is elected by open list pr in a single national constituancy with no electoral threshold and the president is elected through ranked choice voting and can impose an absolute veto on the leg. and issue executive orders which cannot be lifted by the leguslature, if you wrote 20 pages imagining how politicians, experts, media would talk in the public space and then you pretended that a nationalistic society (like Russia, Israel or China for example) had such a system something magical would happen. I am aware that Britain, Canada and othet fptp systems are more universalist, but compared to the US they are less so. I am also aware that the executive in South Korea, Mexico and elsewhere can veto the legislature, but those countries use mixed member pr and only have 2/3s veto. I think the cultutal struggles in the US are a product of their incomplete universality. I think single member constituancies lock the people below and radicalize them, closed list also radicalizes them. Germany, Spain, Italy and Portugal are culturally closer to Serbia than to the US or Britain.
6 months ago | 0
Yiannis, will you PLEASE sit down and read some Karl Marx? It's OBVIOUS these analyses hit on something, but are lacking in a lot of the insights Marx already made close to 200 years ago...
1 year ago (edited) | 1
Yanis Varoufakis
Explaining on Al Jazeera what I mean with the proposal to blow up the banking system
2 years ago | [YT] | 24