Yanis Varoufakis : capitalism isn’t working. Here’s an alternative | Economics

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  • Yanis Varoufakis: capitalism isn’t working. Here’s an alternative | Economics | The Guardian
    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/04/yanis-varoufakis-capitalism-isnt-working-heres-an-alternative
    https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/513b124ac4abe7eb85d496abb448ac85f5ef2d68/0_141_5754_3452/master/5754.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-ali

    (...) Before 2020, politics seemed almost like a game, but with Covid came the realisation that governments everywhere possessed immense powers. The virus brought the 24-hour curfew, the closure of pubs, the ban on walking through parks, the suspension of sport, the emptying of theatres, the silencing of music venues. All notions of a minimal state mindful of its limits and eager to cede power to individuals went out of the window.

    Many salivated at this show of raw state power. Even free-marketeers, who had spent their lives shouting down any suggestion of even the most modest boost in public spending, demanded the sort of state control of the economy not seen since Leonid Brezhnev was running the Kremlin. Across the world, the state funded private firms’ wage bills, renationalised utilities and took shares in airlines, car makers, even banks. From the first week of lockdown, the pandemic stripped away the veneer of politics to reveal the boorish reality underneath: that some people have the power to tell the rest what to do.

    The massive government interventions misled naive leftists into the daydream that revived state power would prove a force for good. They forgot what Lenin had once said: politics is about who does what to whom. They allowed themselves to hope that something good might transpire if the same elites that had hitherto condemned so many to untold indignities were handed immeasurable power.

    It was the poorer and the browner people who suffered most from the virus. Why? Their poverty had been caused by their disempowerment. It aged them faster. And it made them more vulnerable to disease. Meanwhile, big business, always reliant on the state to impose and enforce the monopolies on which it thrives, boosted its privileged position.

    The Amazons of this world flourished, naturally. The lethal emissions that had temporarily subsided returned to choke the atmosphere. Instead of international cooperation, borders went up and the shutters came down. Nationalist leaders offered demoralised citizens a simple trade: authoritarian powers in return for protection from a lethal virus – and scheming dissidents.

    If cathedrals were the middle ages’ architectural legacy, the 2020s will be remembered for electrified fences and flocks of buzzing drones. Finance and nationalism, already on the rise before 2020, were the clear winners. The great strength of the new fascists was that, unlike their forerunners a century ago, they don’t need to wear brown shirts or even enter government to gain power. The panicking establishment parties – the neoliberals and social democrats – have been falling over themselves to do their job for them through the power of big tech. (...)