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This is worth watching
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Tax Research UK Blog is written by Richard Murphy unless otherwise stated and published by ​Tax Research LLP under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
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Great lecture, if only we had someone of Yanis’ intellect in our current government..
The irony is that it will probably take individuals with a Marxist background to save capitalism by ushering in a new incarnation of it! 😉
Agree with Theremustbeanotherway. Excellent lecture, and all using a few small sheets of paper. There’s so much good stuff in there it’s hard to know what to highlight. His admissions on the temptations of privilege and a false sense of entitlement at 50.40 are spot on, as are his comments about being on the left in the UK under Thatcher at 40 mins.
Loved the criticism of the EC’s response to the banking crisis: ‘Orchestrated idiocy at its worst’ (44 mins). And his remarks that this has unleashed a ‘Juggernaut of human suffering progressing from one country to another, one realm to another.’ Of course, we know all about that in the UK, where our current government used the economic downturn as the excuse to implement yet another variant of disaster capitalism (so familiar in south America) to oppress and pillage the vast majority of the population.
His comments on how a Syriza government might go about trying to gain allies to pursue its policies are also highly insightful (1.08).
But of most value, I think, is his demolition of economics based on mathematical models (‘There can be no truth coming out of mathematical economic models… Impossible to close your model while allowing for complexity’ (28 mins). And his explanation of why he considers himself an “erratic” Marxist. As Varoufakis points out, neoliberalism has been highly successful at promoting the fallacy that ‘Wealth is privately created and then appropriated to the state through taxation.’ Whereas, the truth is that ‘wealth is collectively produced and then privately appropriated’, as Marx argued. But then he goes on to highlight the errors of Marx (as he sees it), the most fundamental being that having spent years arguing that “value” is always a product of human free will, he then spent years trying to reduce that humanism to mathematical models, thus advancing the liberal project of the separation of economics from politics, a project that the 99% continue to pay the price of.
That exposure of the dialectic Marxc would not address is quite fun
YV’s critique of Marx at this point, that he contributed to the liberal project inadvertently, has been made before within the larger marxist commentariat. I’m not sure it’s correct if you actually read Capital. It is in many ways a book designed to elicit a lot of tender feelings towards the industrial workers suffering under factory conditions. The book moves between the abstract and the concrete continually which much marxist commentary subsequently did not do very much. Most marxists tend to get caught up in very dry discussions, the scholasticism YV talks about, and I wonder if YV is thinking more about this than about Capital itself. If you never get past the analysis of the commodity then you miss out on some brilliant historical analyses.
YV’s other point about Marx not understanding the power of his own work is more insightful but not completely correct. I won’t bore people with quotes. However when one remembers how many people turned up at his funeral, he might be forgiven in thinking his life a relative failure and his work in the same light.
What interests me about Marx today is that he was envisioning a different social world that would be based on need and with reference to how humanity and nature interact (yes indeed see John Bellamy Foster’s Marx’s Ecology). What we have today cannot last indefinitely and perhaps not for much longer and it won’t be given up without one helluva fight. If Marx isn’t right about everything he would seem to have been right about capitalism and class struggle.
Marx clearly got a lot right in economics
But not everything
And not all of history is a footnote to Marx
But where he has things to say, let’s read him, like any other economist
What I do not get is the continual re-analysis of Capital. Important as it was I’ve never thought it worthy of that much attention
But admittedly it’s some time since I read any of it
The Guardian had a fine article by Varoufakis the other day – basically a written version of the speech. The last two or three paras were very very interesting.
Varoufakis is one of those people you are glad to have been able to listen to when you look back on your life. I hope that his influence grows – along with the many other sane voices who are trying to find a better way to make the world go around.