academics-from-greece

"Δεν υπάρχει τέλος της ιστορίας. Το σήμερα έχει συνέχεια το αύριο. Από εμάς τους ίδιους εξαρτάται η συνέχεια αυτή."

"Simitis is good, but he is not PASOK."

"When I took over as Prime Minister, I had already known Andreas for more than thirty years. There were very few PASOK cadres who had been with him for such a long time. Political commentators highlighted our conflicts, the distance that separated us in life and politics, our different behaviors. However, they overlooked our many commonalities: our resistance to the junta, our struggles for the establishment and development of PASOK, our confrontation with the Right, our cooperation for an effective government. We maintained a stable relationship between us, despite any friction."

"State authority cannot, and must not, dominate economic and social activity."

"Populism transfers the social problem from the plain of ideology to a level that does not disturb the status quo of social relations. The assistance of the state and the benefits derived from it is the sole objective of political struggles in Greece."

"Our political practice followed the same track as that of the right-wing governments; many times we implemented ad hoc policies; we maintained clientelistic relations between government and voters; we made selective allocations of funds and we introduced measures benefiting specific groups. The principle governing our political practice was that the party and the government were always right and that their actions had to be justified;... we do not need attractive slogans that create rising expectations but systematic programming and well-planned action."

"The mobile phone marks the appearance of a new “organ” (called the third hear-and-talk organ) in the evolutionary time line; one that extends the human language system, both on the receiving (i.e., hearing) and the sending (i.e., speech) end."

"The invention of mobile technologies has demolished distance and boundaries (private or public), and it will soon even demolish the very concept of what it means to be here or there."

"For the physically disadvantaged, the mobile phone (and more generally, the virtual identity that may accompany it) makes their problem disappear (no one can tell on the phone how you look, i.e., if you are paralyzed or if you are ugly) by lending them an “invisible” body."

"The computer constitutes the first human construction that aspired to amplify mental rather than physical human powers."

"We need to change the circumstances of people's lives, so we need investments. We need to push investment up because investment is what we need to create the good quality jobs that will create the incomes that will stop deflation: the markets won't do it on their own."

"They [the Chinese] are immensely self-serving, as they would. But a the same time they have a quality that we need in Southern Europe. Actually, I think everyone needs to have foreign direct investment by patient inverstors. They are patient investors. They don't come in to grab an asset for speculative purposes. They come in order to create a base on which to build and build and build. And their horizon is 20-30 years. What Europe has not done with Greece is to do what the Chinese were prepared to do to come there with their workers, with their engineers, and actully do some serious work."

"They [the Chinese] are far more humanistic than the United States ever was. [...] Of course they're trying... they are peddling for influence, but they are non-interventionists. Absolutely non-interventionists in a way that Europeans, the West, has never managed to fathom. The Chinese never asked Apple to go to Shenzhen and produce all the iPhones, it was Steve Jobs that decided that. It was not China that went to Washington DC and demanded that they buy a third of your national debt. If they hadn't bought it, you would be in serious trouble. [...] When it comes to the influence of China outside its borders, it's quite remarkable that they don't seem to have any military ambitions. Instead of going into Africa with troops, colonially destroying the country, killing people like the West has done for the last hundred years, what they did was they went to Addis Ababa and they said to the government: "We can see you have problems with your infrastructure, we would like to build some new airports and upgrade your railway system, create a telephone system, and rebuild your roads. And we will do this all for free." No strings attached. "We don't want anything from you". And they did. Why did they do it? Because this is soft power."

"I’d say DiEM25’s program is the only one worth fighting for. In the European elections we didn’t do well — we got just over 1 percent of the vote. But I should add, our total budget was just €85,000, a pitiful sum for a European election. People running to be the mayor of even a small town would spend many times that. Running on a principled position meant we didn’t have the infrastructure or spending power to do better. ... in the European elections our party, MeRA25, had to struggle against a systematic effort to silence us. We received absolutely no media exposure until the moment where media were forced by law to mention us and give us a little airtime. This was not true of Popular Unity or other smaller parties advocating Lexit [a left-wing exit from the EU]. …These are deeply conservative forces... There is nothing liberal about them: they are traditional, austerian class warriors against the working class... The regime did not feel threatened by parties advocating exit from the euro and EU."

"Our view — that we’re not going to leave, and it’s up for the German government to leave, or to throw us out — is harder for them to deal with. The regime despised us because we neither want Grexit nor fear it. Our call unilaterally to implement perfectly moderate policies without fear or passion destabilized them. It was a danger to their system because of its widespread appeal....But things are also changing. In recent weeks, we have built strength among the trade unions, for instance among the electricity workers. They were betrayed by Syriza, who broke up and privatized the public energy company.... the cleaning workers in the public sector... bore the brunt of the troika’s assault against the poor...Social movements... need a political organization that allows them a voice beyond their specific localities... one that doesn’t dominate them. If they don’t have this, then they will be crushed by a new right-wing regime of a resurgent oligarchic right – one founded on.. the state of debt bondage until 2060 agreed with the creditors by Syriza... Consider this, for instance: Syriza sold the railways for €43 million... they’d have got more money tearing up the rails and selling them as scrap metal. Or take gambling — Syriza enabled the deployment of thirty-five thousand poker machines by a private company, exploiting a bankrupt people with the fake promise of easy winnings. Even the Right’s privatizations were less deplorable than Syriza’s."

"Millions of Europeans looked with hope to this country, and it was Alexis Tsipras’s Syriza government (elected that January) [2015] that had the responsibility for keeping that window open, and for opening it up further for others. What these millions wanted a break from was not even true neoliberalism, but what I would call bankruptocracy — a new regime in which the greatest power was wielded by the most bankrupt bankers. Tsipras’s surrender in July 2015 closed that window of opportunity... Ever since he surrendered to the troika, Tsipras... dilemma put to progressives: “Who do you want to torture you — an enthusiastic torturer, or someone like me who doesn’t want to torture you but will do it to keep his job?”"

"What is being offered to the Greek people is circuses with no bread. And the circuses are not even funny."

"These lazy answers always flourish during periods of deflation. Deflation, ladies and gentlemen, was always going to be the result of this particular design of the euro and deflation begets monsters: it was Mussolini, it was Hitler; now it is [a new fascist international]."

"Unfortunately the euro's design has created a vicious cycle between failed institutions that create failed policies that lead to discontent and then the only way the powers-that-be in Brussels can clamp down and continue to impose their authority is through increasing degrees of authoritarianism."

"In the United States you have the ridiculous situation where the Democratic Party is going to the people who voted for Trump saying you were duped by Putin, Putin stole the election through Facebook. (...) Did Putin try to influence the election in the United States? I'm sure he did. But I did too. I did, I really did. I did my best to influence the election and failed spectacularly and Putin had about the same impact that I had. This is really very important: we do not sacrifice good people to the ultra-right by treating them like morons and by demonizing them. This is crucial: we have to win the battle of ideas by treating people with respect independently of whether they agree or even like us or not."

"I would like to note that I have long considered myself a libertarian Marxist. This causes laughter and outrage from both Marxists and libertarians because they accuse me of being a hypocrite. If you are libertarian you cannot be a Marxist and if you are a Marxist you cannot be libertarian, they say. I see it differently."

"2020 leaves behind much debris — pain, fear, broken lives, smashed dreams... Governments have stupendous powers that they hitherto chose not to use, deferring to the exorbitant power of Big Business. Yes, the money-tree does exist after all. Except, of course, that is only harvested by the powerful on behalf of the oligarchy: Money created by the rich for the rich. Solvency is a political decision because power-politics, not markets, decide who is bankrupt and who is not. Wealth has nothing to do with hard work or entrepreneurship. America’s billionaires made 931 billion dollars from the pandemic. They got richer in their sleep... Yes, 2020 was a vintage year for capitalists, but capitalism died! Liberated from any remaining competition, colossal platform companies like Amazon own everything. Now, it is up to us to make 2021 a year of radical change in the interests of the many. Happy New Year and carpe diem..."

"While bringing about radical change is never easy, it is now abundantly clear that everything could be different. There is no longer any reason why we should accept things as they are."

"So moving from the oligarchic ownership model, where you buy as many votes… and this is how you should think of shares; shares are votes! And they are the votes in the assemblies where serious decisions are made. The serious decisions are not made in the Houses of Parliament. They are not made in the Congress or the Bundestag. They are made in the boards of directors and the general assemblies of Goldman Sachs, of Volkswagen, of Google, and so on. This is where the big decisions are being made, the decisions that determine your life, as well as life on the planet. So these are the votes that count. And to say that there is a market for votes and the rich can buy them is the end of democracy... We have an oligarchy with elections and the elections are bought by the oligarchy."

"On Modern capitalism & Amazon"

"I call it techno-feudalism. I don’t call it capitalism anymore. We need to distinguish what was going on before 2008 from what was going on after 2008. Amazon is not a market; it’s a fiefdom. And it’s a fiefdom that’s connected to other fiefdoms, like Facebook, through the cloud services of Amazon, which are much greater and bigger than Amazon.com. It’s like a much more technologically advanced form of feudalism. And this is completely sustained by central bank money. So you have the combination of the king, the sovereign, the state, the central bank and the feudal lords, the techno-feudal lords. You can see that this system is constantly doubling-down on our extinction as a species. We had the pandemic and what did they do? More of the same... Jeff Bezos is getting rich not because of the profits of Amazon, but because of the increase of the share price. You’ve heard that he made what, $60 billion since the beginning of the pandemic? That’s not because of the profits of Amazon. Amazon is not that profitable. They have huge revenues, but they also have costs. The actual profits are nothing like that. It’s maybe one billion altogether, but he made 60! From the share price."

"A young man in Australia, a long, long time ago, well before we ever knew about WikiLeaks, had an idea: the idea of using Big Brother’s technology to create a large digital kind of mirror to turn to the face of Big Brother so as to enable us to be able to watch him watching us — a bit like turning the mirror to the face of the Medusa. WikiLeaks is based on that idea... WikiLeaks and Julian, as we know, have been persecuted for revealing to the world, especially to liberals, Democrats, Tories, social democrats — revealing to them the crimes against humanity perpetrated by our own elected leaders, in our name, behind our backs."

"Why did the original Non-Aligned Movement fall prey to neo-imperialism's highest form, which is of course globalization, financialized capitalist globalization? The short answer is because capitalists, in practice, proved better internationalists than we were. Because they understood the nature of neo-imperialism better than we did, and that's why they won."

"What did they understand better than we did? They understood better than we did the new, audacious imperialism that was born in 1971, when Bretton Woods collapsed, and the United States dollar was no longer convertible to gold, prompting [President] Richard Nixon to send a message to Europeans, European governments, and the world's capitalists, saying: "The dollar, as of today, is your problem"."

"And how right Nixon was. As the American – the US, I shouldn't say American – as the US deficit skyrocketed, the world was flooded with American dollars. And the banks, the central banks outside the United States, were forced to use these American dollars, since they could not be converted to gold anymore, as the reserves with which they backed their own currency."

"The dollar suddenly became something like an IOU issued by the hegemon. Before long, the global financial system was backed by IOUs issued by a hegemon who decided what foreigners holding those IOUs could do or couldn’t do with the IOUs issued by the hegemon."

"America was now a fully fledged deficit country, with a big trade deficit. But it was nothing like any other deficit country in the world. You see, Argentina, France, India, Greece needed to borrow dollars. America didn't need to borrow dollars to back up its currency. It didn't need to raise interests rates in order to prevent an exodus of dollars. The exodus of dollars was the foundation of American hegemony."

"A Chinese official once described to me globalization as something that was founded on a "dark deal" – that's how the Chinese official put it to me: a dark deal."

"Why did he call it dark? Because it was founded on a dark, unspoken, implicit pact between America's ruling class and foreign capitalists and rentiers."

"Without the dollar's and America's global dominance, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or German capitalists would not have been able continually to extract colossal surplus value from their workers and then stash it away in America’s rentier economy."

"Europe in its infinite wisdom decided to deal with this bankruptcy by loading the largest loan in human history on the weakest of shoulders … What we’ve been having ever since is a kind of fiscal waterboarding that has turned this nation into a debt colony."

"(The ) resembles a fine riverboat that was launched on a still ocean in 2000. And then the first storm that hit it, in 2008, started creating serious structural problems for it. We started leaking water. And of course, the people in the third class, as in the Titanic, start feeling the drowning effects first."

"Why did they force us to close the banks? To instil fear in people. And spreading fear is called terrorism."

"The referendum of 5th July will stay in history as a unique moment when a small European nation rose up against debt-bondage..."

"Politics, I now understand, is at its best when it enlightens us via an opponent's insight."

"If you take an iPhone apart, every single technology in it was developed by some government grant, every single one."

"I mean, the enclosures in Britain would never have happened without the king's army and without state brutality for pushing peasants off their ancestors' land and creating the commodification of labor, the commodification of land which then gave rise to capitalism."

"The world we live in is ruled by insiders... one of the first things said to me by a very high ranking American official.. when I was minister... you have a choice. You can be an insider or an outsider. If you are an outsider you'll retain your right to say anything you want, whatever you believe in but know that you're going to be persecuted, you're going to be villified and you'll be jettisoned. … On the other hand, you can chose to be an insider, to play the game... if you chose to be an insider you'll be given information that outsiders don't have, you'll be given... an opportunity... to make some... small tiny changes within the inside, but the one rule that you must respect, is that insiders do not tell outsiders the truth, and they do not turn against other insiders ... Julian [Assange]... created the technology that allowed the outsiders to get a glimpse within...and this is why he's being persecuted this way and one of the worst aspects of this persecution from a feminist perspective is that he's been accused of a crime for which he's never been charged, that turns progressives against feminists and feminists against progressives. This attempt by the establishment to turn progressives against themselves in order to prosecute someone who has... revealed their crimes is a heinous crime in itself...""

"[F]aced with a choice between an agreement that is to the advantage of the peoples of Europe and one that bolsters their own power within the EU institutions at the expense of Europe's social economies, the Brussels establishment, and the powerful politicians behind them, will choose the latter every time. ... negotiations will be an exercise in futility and frustration. Barnier's two-phase negotiation announcement amounts to a rejection of the principle of … negotiation. He is, effectively, saying to you: First you give me everything I am asking for unconditionally (Phase 1) and only then will I hear what you want (Phase 2)."

"Wo Ich bin, soll Es auftauchen."

"There is no proper meaning … every expression is essentially tropic."

"Castoriadis has given this tradition [the tradition of praxis philosophy] new life by introducing a unique linguistic turn. His work has a central place among the new departures in praxis philosophy that have evolved since the mid-1960s, especially in Eastern Europe (in Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, and Belgrade), and that for a decade enlivened the discussions at the Summer School of Korčula. It is the most original, ambitious, and reflective attempt to think through the liberating mediation of history, society, external and internal nature once again as praxis."

"Either history is really governed by laws, and in that case a truly human-activity is impossible, except perhaps in a technical sense; or human beings really make their own history, and then the task of theory will not be directed to discovering 'laws', but to the elucidation of the conditions with in which human activity unfolds."

"Rousseau already said this: the English believe that they are free because they elect representatives every five years, but they are free only one day every five years: the day of the election. And even that isn’t true. The election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are being stuffed, but because the options are determined in advance. No one asked the people what they wanted to vote on. They are told, “vote for or against the Maastricht Treaty,” for example. But who made the Maastricht Treaty? It wasn’t us. There is Aristotle’s wonderful phrase responding to the question, “Who is the citizen?”: “The citizen is someone who is able to govern and to be governed.” Are there forty million citizens in France at the moment? Why wouldn’t they be able to govern? Because all political life aims precisely at making them forget how to govern. It aims at convincing them that there are experts to whom matters must be entrusted. There is thus a political counter-education. Whereas people should accustom themselves to exercising all sorts of responsibilities and taking initiatives, they accustom themselves to following the options that others present to them or voting for those options. And since people are far from being stupid, the result is that they believe in it less and less, and they become cynical, in a kind of political apathy."

"A century after the Communist Manifesto was written and thirty years after the Russian Revolution, the revolutionary movement, which has witnessed great victories and suffered profound defeats, seems somehow to have disappeared. Like a river approaching the sea, it has broken up into rivulets, run into swamps and marshes, and finally dried up on the sands."