The Global Minotaur: A theory of the Global Crisis

When the Great Depression followed the 1929 stock-market crash, almost everyone acknowledged that capitalism was unstable, unreliable, and prone to stagnation.
In the decades that followed, however, that perception changed. Capitalism’s post-war revival, and especially the post-Cold War rush to financialised globalisation, resurrected faith in markets’ self-regulating abilities.

The president of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, just stepped down  in search of greener pastures. His readiness to resign  prompted David Adler (DiEM25’s Policy Coordinator) to I to write this op-ed in The Guardian arguing for a New Bretton Woods. In this CNN interview David explains what we mean.

In 2018, the good people behind the Edinburgh Festival kindly invited me to host a series of discussions under the title KILLING DEMOCRACY? My remit was: Further to explore the question of whether the current form of financialised capitalism is devouring democracy, reflecting on my work with the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). In a series of four events I tried to explore the ways in which the demos can be put back into our democracies.

Yanis Varoufakis: Risk has not been diminished, just taken out of sight

Ten years after its near-death experience, capitalism is back to its old ways.

Before 2008 we could all see that global trade imbalances were growing inexorably, creating a glut of savings in surplus countries that flowed into deficit countries, causing house price, stock exchange and debt bubbles whose bursting would never end well. What few could see, however, was that, behind the dominant narrative of unfettered competition and equilibrating market forces, a different reality was taking shape. Corporate power was succeeding in reducing price competition, usurping (and often replacing) market forces and controlling effective demand.

Mythos Der Kapitalismus ist entzaubert und bringt uns das größte Faschismusproblem seit den Dreißigern

Was im Herbst 2008 an der Wall Street geschah, hatten die allermeisten Menschen bis dahin für unmöglich gehalten, schließlich hatte man ihnen jahrelang weisgemacht, dass etwas Derartiges schlichtweg nicht passieren könnte. Es war, als ob man dabei zuguckt, wie die Sonne, kurz nachdem sie am Horizont aufgeht, komplett aus ihrer Bahn trudelt und abstürzt. Die Menschheit sah fassungslos zu.

Every so often humanity manages genuinely to surprise itself. Events to which we had previously assigned zero probability push us into what the ancient Greeks referred to as aporia: a state of intense bafflement urgently demanding a new model of the world we live in. The Crash of 2008 was such a moment. Suddenly, the world ceased to make sense in terms of what, a few weeks before, passed as conventional wisdom – even McDonald’s, for goodness’ sake, could not secure an overdraft from Bank of America!

Even before Donald Trump drove to tears of dismay NATO’s leaders, Theresa May, the EU’s officialdom and Washington’s own ‘intelligence community’, the writing was on the wall: Trump is methodically dismantling a world order that he no longer believes to be in the interests of the United States’ ruling class.

Mon 11 Jun 2018 16.23 BST