Vital Space

From the very beginning, Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon’s statues and friezes caused something of a discursive British civil war. On one side were humanists, like Lord Byron; on the other were Empire apologists, who defend Elgin’s actions and support the British Museum’s inalienable property rights to the artefacts it, eventually, purchased from him. Over […]

Our era will be remembered for the triumphant march of a Twin Authoritarianism in whose wake the vast majority of humanity experience unnecessary hardship and the planet’s ecosystem suffers avoidable climate destruction.

 
Η παρασιτική ολιγαρχία δείχνει το ασχημότερο πρόσωπό της όταν ασχολείται με τον Πολιτισμό

Before capitalism, debt appeared at the very end of the economic cycle; a mere reflection of the power to accumulate already produced surpluses. Under feudalism, production came first with the peasants working the land to plant and harvest crops. Distribution followed the harvest, as the sheriff collected the lord’s share. Part of this share was later monetised when the lord’s men sold it at some market. Debt only emerged at the very last stage of the cycle when the lord would lend his money to debtors, the King often amongst them.

Free market capitalism died over a 100 years ago and gave way to monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism is now not even able to reproduce itself, let alone sustain the planet, common decency etc. But what comes next?

DiEM25 is changing the way we do politics and fund our campaigns. From our first day, we declared that we shall not be receiving money from bankers, Brussels, oligarchs and assorted vested interests – that we would struggle with whatever funding our activists could provide from their meagre resources.

A culture war is underway in Europe – not between the ‘anywheres’ and the ‘nowheres’, but between those who use culture to divide – by class, by race, by nation – and those who use it to connect and include. This war is not based in Parliament – but on the street, in our homes, and across the web. If these conflicts present real dangers, they also present opportunities to reach people that have disconnected from traditional forms of politics – and to hear their voices in response.

Our theme is a wall. A wall that is neither some ordinary physical structure at a specific site, nor a symbolic wall. It takes a material form in sites around the globe while transcending locations and leapfrogging whole continents as if in a strange quest to globalise itself, to infect our supposedly unifying world with a sinister, impenetrable division – a wall that is so familiar and yet so inconvenient that most gaze away from it.

Yanis Varoufakis is full of teasing paradoxes. As a radical economics guru, he expounds on the state of the world with a mixture of burning grievance and brimming, almost imperious, self-confidence. Aged 57, his personal baggage includes a keen sense of the wrongs of recent Greek history, which overshadowed his parents’ lives, and the glories of the ancient Greek heritage. But his real obsession is with the future.