Varoufakis acerta no diagnóstico mas erra na receita

Diagnóstico certo e receita errada! Varoufakis ignora as dinâmicas da realidade e insiste em visões “ideológicas” (que, diz ele, há que explicar… vícios de professor!). Com a esquerda assim (e também de outros modos) perdida e com a direita do sistema enredada nos destroços do neo-liberalismo, a nova direita europeia, livre das peias e narrativas neo-liberais, tem toda a liberdade para surfar as vagas do descontentamento dos eleitorados e ser “popular”.

The Italian crisis was the left’s final warning:it must adopt a new, credible EU policy agenda

YANIS VAROUFAKIS | 6 JUNE 2018

Italy’s recent political crisis has at once confirmed the European Union’s unsustainability and the left’s impotence. It’s time to explain how the bloc, and the euro, could be run differently, democratically and sustainably.

That the euro is a currency system within which a country like Italy cannot breathe has been obvious for at least a decade. Equally predictable was that the ensuing asphyxiation would lead to a political implosion – such as the one unfolding in slow motion since the Italian general election in March. What was not inevitable was the left’s spectacular failure to benefit from the kind of crisis it ought to have been well positioned to predict.

The 2008 financial crisis was our generation’s 1929. We have been angst-ridden ever since by the prospect of the left failing to resist the organised misanthropy that such historic moments spawn.

Our worst fears could not have been more emphatically confirmed than by the political transformation in Italy. An anti-systemic majority of Italian voters ignored the left and installed a right-wing government (comprised of the Five Star Movement and the Lega) with a mandate to slash taxes for the rich and cage 500,000 migrants prior to expelling them to goodness knows where.

Debt and capital accumulation are capitalism’s twin engines. When one falters the other suffers, a periodic crisis that is as certain as death or taxes. What is special about Italy is that its capitalism does not resemble that of any other European country. The only advanced country that it comes close to is Japan.

Like Japan, Italy has a dynamic, export-orientated manufacturing sector, a rapidly ageing population and unusually low private debt. Since debt is to capitalism what hell is to Christianity (unpleasant but essential), large public debt makes up the shortfall in both Japan and Italy. The crucial difference between the two countries is that Italy is part of the EU and, more importantly, the eurozone.

When a debt crisis, which is inevitable in every capitalist country, occurred in Japan, its banks became insolvent and continued for years to resemble zombies: undead institutions incapable of borrowing to lend to business. This is comparable to the impact on Italian banks after 2008. But whereas the treasury and the central bank of Japan acted as lenders of last resort, Italy was stranded in a eurozone in which its central bank and treasury were prohibited from intervention. That is why Italy’s crisis was so much worse than Japan’s, and why its political centre now lies in ruins.

(Leia a versão integral desta análise em IntelNomics –  Varoufakis acerta no diagnóstico mas erra na receita)

Yanis Varoufakis is a founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 and a former Greek finance minister

Exclusivo Tornado / IntelNomics

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