Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece gives a TED talk.
The summary is:
Have you wondered why politicians aren’t what they used to be, why governments seem unable to solve real problems? Economist Yanis Varoufakis, the former Minister of Finance for Greece, says that it’s because you can be in politics today but not be in power — because real power now belongs to those who control the economy. He believes that the mega-rich and corporations are cannibalizing the political sphere, causing financial crisis. In this talk, hear his dream for a world in which capital and labor no longer struggle against each other, “one that is simultaneously libertarian, Marxist and Keynesian.”
He says we should be weary of ideas that threaten democracy at the cost of so called economic development:
Democracy. In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. We see democracy not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is, but we see it as part of our society’s furniture. We tend to think of it as an intransigent given. We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. It doesn’t.
00:41 Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism, spectacular growth, while politics remains democracy-free. Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods, here in Europe.
01:03 Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece — the newly elected Greek government — in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister, I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation’s democratic process — our elections — could not be allowed to interfere with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece. At that moment, I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew, or the Chinese Communist Party, indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.
01:41 Tonight, here, I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. I want to ask you to join me in believing again that Lee Kuan Yew, the Chinese Communist Party and indeed the Eurogroup are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy — that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy. And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted.
He picks examples from Athens democracy:
This is my quarrel with capitalism. Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies, green technologies, which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth.
04:58 Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer? I believe so, but before we move on,what do we mean by democracy? Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government.
05:16 Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves.But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded.
05:31 What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state. Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn’t last long.Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere — the corporate world, if you want — as a democracy-free zone.
06:53 Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power.
Hmmm.. Lots of history here which has to b carefully read as there could be several interpretations of Athens democracy.
It is interesting how all elections are around this theme of “It is economy stupid!”. We don’t realise in the process how there are issues other than economics which matter for democracy. One has had some discussions (some of them heated ones) over how has democracy helped? I only tell them wait till you lose it and then only you will know.
Moreover, all these are social constructs created by Sapiens, keep moving us in circles…
Mostly Economics 
Leave a Reply