Yanis Varoufakis - Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present

Yanis Varoufakis is the author of the bestseller Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism and two previous books, Adults in the Room, a memoir of his time as finance minister of Greece, and an economic history of Europe, And the Weak Suffer What They Must?, both of which were number one bestsellers. Born in Athens in 1961, Yanis Varoufakis was for many years a professor of economics in Britain, Australia and the USA before he entered politics. He is co-founder of the international grassroots movement, DiEM25, and in 2019 won election as one of its representatives in the Greek Parliament. He is currently Professor of Economics at the University of Athens.

yanisvaroufakis.eu / @yanisvaroufakis

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism (2017)

Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europes Deep Establishment (2017)

And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability (2016)

The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (2011)

For Dana, without whom Another Now would be unimaginable and This Now intolerable

A year ago today we buried Iris in a red and black coffin. Red for the revolutionary fire constantly blazing in her belly. And black to remind us, as she kept doing, of the irreducible dark side in us all.

Iriss funeral was as she would have wanted it, save for Evas absence. The tributes provided a fitting encomium for my extraordinary friend but the words washed over me. Some twenty years had passed since I had last seen Iris and Eva together. They had been sitting on Iriss patio, Eva holding her usual glass of Pinot Grigio, Iris scolding her in tirades punctuated only by mouthfuls of chilled vodka. Why on earth did Iris ever take Eva under her wing? I recall wondering.

For a woman who could never have conceived of a good market, a noble war or an unjust strike, it was an improbable friendship. Eva was a recovering investment banker turned true-blue, dry, academic economist. Far from having a winning personality, if anything she exemplified Oscar Wildes definition of the cynic she who knows everything about prices but nothing about values. And Im not even sure she has a clue about prices! Iris once said teasingly in her presence. Nonetheless, as Iriss casket was being lowered into the ground, Evas absence weighed heavily.

With Iris and Eva gone, Costa was the only other one left of our old gang. On the day Iris died I had messaged him twice, using an old number I still had. To no avail. Resigned to endure the funeral without him, I was surprised when I glimpsed him there. He was not easy to spot, a solitary figure leaning against a plane tree, watching from a distance as Iris descended to her resting place.

Once the mourners began slowly to disperse, I approached him, and his face thankfully brightened up. Though his youthful cheerfulness was all but gone, his eyes still glimmered with his characteristic blend of brilliance and sentimentality. But as we talked he seemed harried and close to paranoia, focused terribly on the diary and how important it was that it should not fall into the wrong hands. It was then that I realized Iris had been in cahoots with him before she had summoned me to the hospice, two weeks before her body gave in to the cancer.

Iriss summons arrived in late June 2035, jolting me out of a two-decade-long seclusion. The last time I had seen either of them was in August 2015 as I was passing through Brighton for one last time, my life in the early stages of an unrelated meltdown. As soon as I entered her room in the hospice, Iris struggled to sit up, determined to muster all her fading energy to receive me. Dismissing any preliminaries, she pointed to a diary sitting on her bedside table and gestured for me to take it. It comes with a directive and an injunction, she whispered.

The directive was unequivocal. I was to focus on the dispatches in the diary and use them to open peoples eyes to possibilities they are incapable of imagining unaided. As for the injunction, she made me promise I would not reveal any of the technical details in it. In due course you will know what I mean, she muttered. Finally, in a bid to lighten the atmosphere, she told me with typical bluntness and bossiness, Get stuck in to it the moment Im dead and buried. Eager not to burden her further, I held her hand and made the promise she had demanded.

Little did I know that in due course meant Costa appearing at her funeral to deliver my instructions, which he did breathlessly in a quiet corner of the graveyard car park. When reading Iriss diary, he said, I had to take precautions against the corporates: Iris wanted you to have her diary. She wanted our story told so that the world understands there is an alternative. But I know she warned you of the one, strict condition: none of the detailed information in the diary regarding my technologies should fall into their hands. Tell me that you understand!

I reassured him that I did. He stared into my eyes to confirm my sincerity. We had it wrong all these years, Yango, he said eventually. We knew that everything about us was being commodified. That everything we did and said was being captured and sold on. But what we had not realized was that the process of digitizing everything about us was proletarianizing everyone, including the bosses. Think about it, Yango. Think about it.

It had been a while since I had found myself on the receiving end of such an outburst, but it seemed somehow appropriate, given that we had just laid to rest the greatest agitator of revolutionary politics I had ever known.

What does it mean to be a proletarian, really? Costa continued, without waiting for a reply. Let me tell you. From bitter experience. It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value into exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.

Without a clue as to why he was telling me all this, I agreed.

This is why I am still here, Yango. Why I stayed behind. To prevent our final defeat at those bastards hands. I cant stop them inventing it for themselves but Ill be damned if I let them grab mine and use it to squeeze the last drop of humanity out of us all.

Satisfied that I had been adequately briefed, Costa took a device from his backpack and placed it firmly in my hands. Its a dampening field device. Idiot proof, he said with a hint of contempt. He showed me how to switch it on to prevent the bastards from gaining access to Iriss diary.

Hoping to catch up properly after all these years, I suggested dinner or at least a drink. Costa simply stared into my eyes, gave me a tight hug and left without looking back.

Watching him walk away, his eyes fixed on the ground, the lyrics of a melancholy Greek song I had learned as a teenager sprang to mind.

Late last night I saw a friend wandering

A hobgoblin-like relic on a motorbike