Yanis Varoufakis on Europe and the Eurozone

An interesting interview here with Yanis Varoufakis.



Now although I do admire Varoufakis, especially for his excellent attack on Postmodernism described here, I see some very troubling points here about Marxism.

Varoufakis says that Marxism is libertarian in some sense, and it is true that Marxism’s ultimate aim was a stateless, utopian paradise. But (as far as I can see) that is not the sense in which Varoufakis calls himself a “libertarian.” For Varoufakis goes on to say that his “libertarian Marxism” is compatible with a belief in the state, which, he says, is “crucial.”

I find these views deeply confusing.

First, why even associate yourself with Marxism at all when all attempts to put Marxism into action lead to mass murder and authoritarian nightmare states? At some point, one has to face the truth that if this is all that real-world Marxists have been able to do, their system stands utterly discredited by the hard evidence of empirical reality. If you do not advocate the abolition of private property, the nationalisation of all industry and a command economy, then why even call yourself a “Marxist”?

Worse still, Varoufakis thinks that “social democracy” has been discredited by modern neoliberal parties like New Labour. I disagree profoundly. Unlike Marxism, post-WWII left-wing parties put their social democratic vision into practice in the West, and it was the most successful system we ever had. And social democracy essentially takes its economic platform from Keynes – not Marx. Radical Keynesian social democracy is the true democratic “socialism,” if one chooses to use that troublesome word.

New Labour and other neoliberal left-wing parties were a betrayal of a social democratic ideology, and there is no reason to regard such neoliberal parties as anything but recent interlopers, charlatans and impostors. And say what you like about them, their evil doesn’t even come close to the horrors of Stalinist Russia or Soviet communism.

The neoliberal left has not discredited social democracy but only demonstrated the need for remembering what its core economic principles should be: a strong heterodox Keynesian or Post Keynesian economic theory.

Also, as I have argued here, it is a profound mistake for people on the left to just smear Britain’s UKIP as “racist” instead of carefully analysing what their policies are and intelligently responding to them.

Self-Refuting Nonsense

Imagine a man with whom you were having a conversation who got up and said this:

“There is no such thing as spoken human communication or spoken human language.”

The very act of asserting that statement while others listen and understand its content utterly refutes what is being asserted: empirically, it is blatantly self-refuting.

Now consider the core belief of Postmodernism:

Proposition (1): there is no such thing as objective truth.

This is self-refuting nonsense as well.

If one believes that there are no objective truths, then it follows that nothing you can say is objectively true, not even the statement that “there are no objective truths.”

What kind of statement, then, were you making? Was your statement just gibberish like the bleating of a goat? Is it, semantically speaking, in the same category as Chomsky’s famous sentence “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously”?

And, epistemologically speaking, what kind of statement was it? If it is understood as a synthetic a posteriori proposition, it is, as we have seen, manifestly self-refuting.

Now of course the sophisticated Postmodernist might defend it as a merely culturally relative truth, true only to a community of people who wish to believe it.

But that will not do. If it is not defended as a universally and objectively true statement, then the Postmodernist has not considered the possibility that objective truths do exist over and above culturally-relative beliefs.

At any rate, we have seen in the last post where it leads: to an intellectually and morally broken world-view that cannot even defend the idea that the worst beliefs in Nazism were objectively false.

I have posed this question before, and I have never seen any Postmodernist sensibly answer it: if it is not an objective historical fact that the Holocaust happened, then why is there so much evidence that it happened? Why the numerous eyewitnesses and survivors and their testimony that we can still read today? Why the huge physical evidence? (e.g., the death camps, gas chambers, etc.).

Either (1) the Holocaust happened as a real, objective event in the past or (2) it did not as an objective fact, and any left-wing person who denies objective truth has got no business opposing, criticising and condemning the disgusting, shameful and ignorant fringe of Holocaust deniers we see today.

Rather, any Postmodernists who really believe their truth relativism and Foucault’s view of truth should be saying that “all truth is made by power,” no objective truths exist, and our “truths” are invented and not determined by some objective reality – not even the Holocaust.

But then the Postmodernist would face these questions:

(1) Is the proposition that “the Holocaust happened” just a truth made by power? If “yes,” what power system “made” it and why?

(2) If you think it is not an objective truth that “the Holocaust happened,” then explain why we have overwhelming evidence that it did.

(3) if you accept the overwhelming evidence that the Holocaust happened, then explain why you would persist in denying the reality of objective truth.

It does not matter what choice the Postmodernist takes, every path they could take here leads to exactly the same end as we saw in the last post: an intellectually and morally broken and bankrupt world-view.