Original subtitles

Oligarchies remain powerful only to the extent

that we privatise our dreams and we privatise our fears,

and we get paralysed by them,

and we get stuck on the couch feeling that

nothing is within our control.

If we stand any chance of collective

and personal emancipation, liberation, in the end, joy,

fun, genuine happiness, that can only come

to us the moment we say, "No, I'm not going to sit here idly

by lamenting my powerlessness.

I'm going to go out there and try to change the world.

I will fail in the same way that I know

that one day I'll die.

It doesn't stop me from trying to live every day to the full."

Collective action,

collective dreams, are a prerequisite for individual freedom.

Greece. Greece. Greece.

The debt crisis in Greece, sparking violent protests,

helping to trigger the rapid sell off as investors worry

that Europe's debt problems will spread.

And of course the darkest fear

is they drag down the US economy.

Really, the US Recovery.

Syriza has grown from a motley alliance of activists

to become the official opposition.

Though the groups on this demo look like activists

everywhere, here,

their party currently leads in the opinion polls.

Okay. How my parents met.

Yeah, yeah, how your parents met.

Okay. Start?

I grew up in a fascist country.

My father, he was apprehended for being a student leader.

And the police that apprehended him apologised

for having done so, but then gave him a denunciation

of communism form to sign.

And my father being liberal, said:

"Well I'm not a communist.

I'm not a Buddhist. I'm not a Muslim.

But if you ask me as an organ of the state, sir, to sign,

this kind of denunciation of Islam

or of, Buddhism or of communism, I'm not going

to do it because it's none of your business."

He refused to sign it.

And then he was beaten up very badly,

and he was tortured for months and months

and months in ways that I don't even want

to discuss on camera.

The more they tortured him, the more they beat him up,

the more stubbornly he was refusing

to sign that piece of paper.

He said to me that the worst moment in the camp,

was a moment when he realised

that if his side had won the Civil War, the communists,

he would be in the same concentration camp

with different guards.

And I asked him, what did he mean by that?

He said, well, there came a moment when he

received, in secret, of course,

a directive from the Communist Party to sign it

so as to get out, and my father refused —

refused the instructions of the Communist Party.

And then he was denounced by the Communist Party for not

heeding their instructions.

So he ended up in the concentration camp, shunned by his comrades

and tortured by the fascists.

He realised then that authoritarianism runs deeply

on both sides.

That was a warning to me as a left-winger.

When my father came out of the camp, out of exile,

after four, four-and-a-half years —

this was in the early 1950s — to go back

to Athens University,

he was a shadow of a man, determined

to just concentrate on his studies as a means of surviving.

In the university,

he came across a young woman, actually the first

female student of chemistry

in the history of the University of Athens.

And she was approached because

of her antipathy towards communists by a quasi-fascist,

or actually quasi-Nazi organisation, who recruited her

and gave her a task: to keep tabs on my dad.

So this is how they met. And

of course, after a few weeks she dropped out of

that horrible organisation and they were together.

Their paths converged politically,

but I remember that when on a very

few occasions, because they

always had a very loving relationship,

but when they would fight the old

rupture reemerged.

I remember once hearing her call him a bloody communist

and him calling her a bloody fascist.

I think that deep down my father,

he was always motivated to ensure that

his fate would not be repeated

in my case.

in 1975, I was 14.

It was a year after the dictatorship had collapsed.

I remember I was distributing leaflets for

some kind of demonstration in the evening.

This copper approached me from behind and grabbed me.

And before I knew it, I was in a cell.

And of course, my parents

were climbing various walls besides themselves with worry.

So I arrive at home at around 6:30, exhausted.

There were no charges. There was nothing.

There was just intimidation.

That night, my father sat me down with my mom

and they both said to me, "Right, you're going

to study in the United Kingdom.

I don't care what you study, anything from anthropology to

zoology, but you're out of here."

So I decided I was going

to be a theoretical physicist.

There was a Greek politician at the time

who was leading the political party that I

belonged to as a teenager.

And he was going to give me a reference letter

because he had been an academic in the Anglo-Saxon world.

So he sat me down. He didn't know who I was.

He just knew that I was an activist in the party.

And he asked me what I wanted to study,

to remind him,

and I said, "Theoretical physics, I'm going to study in Britain."

He said, "No, you won't. I thought, "What? What audacity."

I said, "So what am I going to study?"

He said, "You'll do mathematical economics".

"Mathematical economics?"

I was raging.

I was so annoyed with him, that he would have the gall

to have a view as to what I was going

to study, given that he had precisely zero information about

me, except for the fact that I was a political activist.

But then he explained and it made perfect sense.

He said, "Listen, theoretical physics

and mathematical economics are exactly the same

from a mathematical perspective.

It's the same mathematics, the same models.

The difference," he said "is this: if you study

theoretical physics, nobody's going

to take your political views seriously.

If you study mathematical economics,

because of the power of the narrative,

everybody will be paying attention.

Suddenly you'll have a

capacity to influence people."

My life was finished. I became an economist.

Up until the early 2000s, I was perfectly contented

being an academic holed up in my office in whichever

university I happened to be at.

But at around 2002, 2003,

I experienced a certain sense of anxiety,

at the site of financialisations impending crisis.

I could feel that I was living in a world

that was about to blow up.

I was beginning to sound the alarm whenever I could,

even in the context of discussions with politicians,

trying to warn them that the tsunami was coming,

and we cannot stop it, but we have to prepare for it.

Meltdown on the markets,

as Wall Street is left reeling from some

of the biggest blows in its history.

Stock markets have fallen here and around the world,

as one of America's oldest

and biggest banks files for bankruptcy.

Debt is to capitalism

that which hell is to Christianity: unpleasant and essential.

Whereas debt was tangential to life

before capitalism,

with capitalism, it becomes the turbocharging

unit of production.

It's what allowed immense productive resources

and capacities and forces to be unleashed by capitalism.

The result being the modern world that we live in.

The problem with that is that if you're going to move

to an industrial scale of capitalist production

with networked firms, with large conglomerates

that Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the rest built,

and now the Googles and the Facebooks,

and so on, you need enormous banks.

Enormous banks means an enormous amount of power by the bankers

to push their hand through the time-space continuum,

reach out into the future

and take value

that has not been created yet from the future,

bring it to the present and lend it to various entrepreneurs

to produce the value so that the loop of recycling

between debt and wealth is completed.

But the more successful the financiers are in doing this,

the greater the urge

to keep taking more value from the future

and bringing it into the present in the form of

debt. At some point, the present can no longer service

its debt-servicing needs towards the future.

And that is when you have a crisis.

The 2008 crisis was not one

of the normal periodic downturns.

It is the longest, most slow-burning,

damage-inducing crisis in the history of capitalism.

The implosion of the pyramid of financial capital.

President Obama

and I are agreed that the world is coming together

to act in the face of unprecedented global financial times.

In 2009, something remarkable happened. The Chancellor

of Germany, Angela Merkel,

received a telephone call from her treasury telling her

that the German banks were bankrupt.

At the very same time. The French banks were going bankrupt.

She had to save the German banks to the tune

of 550 billion Euros all in one go.

This to her was political poison.

"At least," she felt, "I've done it. Now I can move on." No.

A few months later, she was told that she has

to give another 300, 400 billion to the French

and German banks because

of the money they had lent to Greece.

And Greece was about to default on its debt

to Deutsche Bank, finance banks, Société Générale, BNP Paribas.

And she said, "I can't do this.

I cannot go back to my federal parliament to ask

for another wad of money for the same banks.

It'll be my political end." So what does she do instead?

She goes to the federal parliament seeking

110 billion, initially, another 130 later,

as solidarity to the Greeks on the basis that

the grasshoppers of the South, they're now bankrupt.

Solidarity in Europe means we have to help them.

We don't want to help them, but we must

because this is what it takes to keep Europe together.

So a second bailout loan

for the same German

and French banks was portrayed as solidarity to the Greeks.

What the German parliamentarians

and the German public were never told was that almost none

of that money went to Greece.

It went to the French and German banks. Mostly.

It became a matter of honour and political expediency,

and political power reproduction to prevent

the public and parliamentarians across Europe

ever from finding out that this was a hidden bailout

for the French and German banks.

So it was always the Greeks this, the Greeks that . . .

the Greeks must repay their debt.

And denial that it was all

a kind of bankruptcy concealment. Denial

that that debt was never going to be repaid.

The rules of the Eurozone banned any bailout.

So they had to find ways of violating their own rules.

The European Commission, which was supposedly the

government of the European Union, had no credibility

with the hardnosed German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble,

or with the German Central Bank, the Bundesbank bank. Who did?

The International Monetary Fund, who had decades

of experience of applied misanthropy in Africa, in Asia,

in all sorts of different societies that were

plundered on behalf of creditors.

This troika of the European Commission,

the European Central Bank,

and the International Monetary Fund became the shadow

government of Europe.

And its first task was to impose the bailouts,

which is a combination of socialism for the bankers

with austerity for the many.

This country is engulfed in a crisis.

And for the past 48 hours has been tearing itself apart.

On the streets here of Syntagma Square

a battle has been fought

and lost by protesters,

but the evidence on the ground here

of political resistance means it will be very difficult

for the Prime Minister, George Papandreou,

and his government, to push through the package

of austerity measures that they say this country

so desperately needs,

"Thieves. Thieves," they

shout at their government as

inside the Greek parliament

they debate a motion of no confidence.

There is certainly no confidence outside, just fury at those

who have brought such hardship on their country.

In this crowd, at least, there is consensus.

They can never repay the debt and nor should they.

The problem is that in the Greek parliament here,

there is not a single, major political party

or political figure who represents the views

of these protesters: that there should be no more bailouts

and that Greece should default on its debts.

The onus was upon me to come up with proposals,

and I began to write articles and appear on BBC television

left, right and centre, talking about the European

crisis that was coming, with Greece being the subprime nexus

of Europe. Due to the fact

that it was common knowledge

that I had been close at some point to the person

who had become Prime Minister in Greece, the prognostication

from me that the Greek state is bankrupt,

that became big news,

and I immediately became the pole of attraction of

the oligarchy's intense hatred.

I was accused of being a national traitor,

because only a national traitor can precipitate

and bring forward a bankruptcy

by declaring the Greek state to be bankrupt.

And, of course, I was not the bankers' best mate.

I knew that there would be repercussions.

One night, it was a Saturday night in 2011,

my wife's son arrived home

after having been out with friends,

very late.

We hear the thud, we hear his footsteps going

towards his bedroom,

so we both surrender to sleep.

A few minutes later, the landline rings. I pick up the phone,

and there is this suave male voice saying

"Mr. Varoufakis, we are very pleased."

We, the royal we.

"We are very pleased that your son has come back from

a good night out with friends."

I said "Who are you? Who is this?"

He carried on describing

where Danae's son had been, naming streets.

He finished by saying, "If you want him to continue

to return safely every night, you better lay off . . ."

And he mentioned a particular bank.

The next morning I told my wife what had happened,

and she said to me, "Listen, either you get into politics

to protect us or we get out of the country."

So we got out of the country. We migrated to

Austin, Texas of all places.

Outside the headquarters

of the conservative New Democracy Party

tonight, the cheers of supporters who have won a narrow

and uncertain victory,

but a victory for all that. Their leader, Antonis Samaras,

is the man most likely

to be the country's next prime minister,

but it's still far from certain he'll have the votes in

Parliament to govern with any effect.

Will you be able to form a government now?

We'll have to, and very soon. I will make sure

that the sacrifices of the Greek people

will bring the country back to prosperity.

By 2014, Greece had already undergone four,

five years of a great depression.

We had lost 28% of national income.

1.3 million unemployed in a country of 10 million people,

of whom only 9% ever received a single penny

in unemployment benefits.

400,000 young men

and women, the best qualified, had left the country.

So, effectively we're talking about a failed state.

When pensions began to decline

and older people increasingly felt that they were

a burden on their families, we had a spate of tragic,

heart-wrenching suicides.

A man in northern Greece went to

the Social Security Department's offices to inquire as

to why his tiny little pension had been eliminated.

They told him that these are the rules

and regulations under the troika,

and there's nothing they can do.

He thanked them. And bystanders, witnesses,

tell us that he looked dazed.

And he walked out, disappeared.

His body was found about two weeks later in a nearby woods,

He'd hanged himself.

The only message he left was to his wife:

"Look after the kids."

It's a little bit like Greece was the subprime borrower,

such as we know here in the US,

and the banks over in Europe are getting nervous that

that subprime borrower, Greece, is essentially going

to walk away from the mortgage that they owe the bank.

And so that's essentially the root of the problem.

How would you respond to someone who said

that Greece had a moral obligation to pay back its debts?

Debtors have traditionally been presented as sinners.

The problem with biblical economics, with moralism

applied to debt, is firstly

that it's from an ethical point of view, very dubious,

but I find it more interesting to criticise it as

absolutely inimical to the notion of capitalism.

Capitalism took off only when the bourgeoisie

accepted that every debt is not sacred.

It was only the institution of the public limited company

that allowed capitalism to take off.

So the workhouse, the debtor's prison, had to be closed down

before capitalism succeeded.

And the reason is really very simple.

If a debt that cannot be repaid

confines one to a prison forever,

then clearly nobody's going to take any substantial risks.

The risks that capitalism requires in order to keep

progressing, leaping boundlessly,

as it has been over the last 200 years.

Suppose we as a society were to guarantee bankers

that which we have guaranteed, at least since 2008,

but, setting that aside, suppose we were

to guarantee all bankers that every single loan

that they gave out would be somehow repaid. Somehow repaid,

by God, by society, bailouts.

Certainly the bankers never have to worry

that they will lose money, that some

of their loans will not be repaid.

If you were a banker with such a cast-iron guarantee

that all your loans will be repaid with interest,

suddenly you have absolutely no incentive to be careful as

to whom you lend money to.

But that means that a gigantic debt bubble would be created,

which would inevitably burst, and

therefore the guarantee would not be honoured

and the banking system would collapse.

So, unsustainable debt, debt haircuts,

debt write-offs, are an essential aspect of capitalism.

Moreover, to say that the ethical burden falls squarely

and exclusively with the debtors is to

lose sight of the very simple fact that

for every irresponsible debtor there is an

irresponsible lender.

Economic and psychological depression was in the air,

in reality, but in propaganda

it was being presented as a success story.

The whole purpose of the propaganda was to win the elections

that were coming up in order to maintain the fallacy

and the illusion that Greece had been stabilised.

It had been stabilised in the same way

that a comatose patient is stable, in the same way that death

is equivalent to stability.

That was the state of Greece in 2014 . . .

and suddenly somebody who is about to inherit the mantle

of the prime ministership

of the most bankrupt nation in Europe, Alexis Tsipras,

the young new leader of the coalition of the radical left,

says to you, "Your proposals are the right ones

and they need to be implemented,

but we need you to play an active part in doing it."

At that moment, moment, I thought, "Oops. What does one do?"

When this party was rising up in the polls,

it was managing to inspire

hope in the hearts of the many.

Its leader and leadership were coming closer

and closer to proposals

I believed were the right proposals for getting us

out of debtors' prison.

So let's say that Syriza gets elected tomorrow.

What do you do? Do you get out of the Eurozone?

Do you say, "I'm going to simply create my own currency, see it

diminish in value by 95%

and try to go for autarchy?"

There is a case for this. There is a case for this.

Argentina, more or less did that,

and I support what they did entirely.

But Argentina had two major advantages that Greece

and Portugal and Ireland don't have.

The first one was that it had its own currency.

The peso existed. It was only a matter of cutting the peg

with the US dollar and then defaulting

and allowing the peso to fall.

The second thing it had was huge tracts

of land producing the goods that China wanted to buy

precisely at that moment.

Greece doesn't have either of these.

We don't have the drachma to devalue.

We have to create the currency.

It will take, in my estimation,

at least eight months to create it.

So this is a bit

like announcing eight months in advance

devaluation. Do you know what this means?

There will be nothing left in eight months from now,

after the new currency is created.

So, if I'm right in that,

and not everybody agrees with me on the left,

but if I'm right in that,

the only alternative is negotiations.

Our common future in Europe

is not the future of austerity.

It's the future of democracy, solidarity, and cooperation.

I felt that it was almost impossible for me

to resist getting involved with them.

But I have to admit

that when the offer was made, I panicked.

Can I trust Syriza? Can I trust the leadership?

Because I knew that our election would signal,

it would trigger, a war with the creditors.

The creditors were hellbent on

maintaining the status quo, maintaining the debtors' prison

that is Greece, maintaining the unsustainable debt,

because unsustainable debt is power for the creditors.

They would have the media on their side.

They would have the banks on their side,

the European Central Bank on their side,

the International Monetary Fund, the Wall Street Journal,

The Financial Times, the BBC, the whole cabal would be there

doing battle against us to keep our people in debtors' prison.

So we knew, I knew, that we would have

a massive battle on our hands, and unity was of the essence.

Now, like David

and Goliath, you may win.

If you're David, you have a little catapult.

Maybe it'll work. As the finance minister

who would have to go to the Eurogroup to fight

for our side, I would have that little catapult,

which comprised a number of

little weapons that we had.

But for that catapult to be used, I would have

to have the complete backing of our team, the Prime Minister

and the war cabinet, as we used to call it.

The great question that was exercising my mind was,

"Would I have their backing?

Not at the beginning. Not at the middle.

But to the very end.

Would they stick around?

Would unity prevail until that last second?"

That was the great question.

There was a very good reason why it was inside my head,

preventing me from sleeping at night.

This reluctance to join was overcome

by writing my letter of resignation

and carrying it in the inside pocket

of my jacket, wherever I went,

as a reminder of the fact that this is not

for me, this is a chore.

This is like taking the rubbish out at night.

Somebody has to do it. You're doing it.

Don't get wedded to it.

Now imagine a friend of yours comes to you

and his income from his business has shrunk by 50%,

and he can't pay his mortgage.

He's about to lose his house,

and then he says to you, "But I have a solution.

There is this bank that offers me a credit card

to meet my mortgage repayments."

What do you think? Is this a good idea?

If you are a friend, you've got to say to them, "Don't do it.

Do not take a credit card out to pretend

that you are repaying your mortgage."

Now, imagine that your friend said to you that

the bank could only give him this credit card on condition

that he agrees to shrink his income further.

Now, that, of course, is nothing short of complete madness.

Don't do it to the nth.

Well, this is precisely what happened in Greece.

The credit card was a bailout,

and the austerity conditions were the conditions that ensured

that the falling income, due to the recession, would crash

as a result of the harshest austerity in the

history of capitalism.

And of course, what happens when the credit card runs out?

Well, either you have to declare your bankruptcy then,

or get another credit card.

In 2012, Greece was given its second bailout, two

years after the first one.

And towards the end of 2014,

that second bailout was running out.

During the election campaign, Syriza promised them

that we would not take out a third credit

card, a third bailout.

The opinion polls say the leader

of the Greek far left is on the verge

of winning a snap election.

Many here are way to the left of any mainstream party.

Tsipras' aim is to make resistance

to austerity mainstream throughout Europe.

It was absolutely fantastically remarkable

watching a society that had been

beaten into submission.

The demonstrations of 2011 had ended. People were quiet.

They were staying in their homes, not demonstrating,

licking their wounds, privatising their fears

and their terror.

And suddenly in January 2015,

that extreme depression, that extreme case of

privatising aspirations, dreams

and nightmares, gave rise to an explosion

of hope, to a popular movement that went

beyond party political divisions.

I had people stopping me in the streets

saying, "I'm a right-winger.

I voted for New Democracy and never voted for you.

But we are together. We need to recover our dignity.

We need to escape debtors prison." Going from three, four percent

in very few years to 40% to win government —

that goes to show it takes

a small spark of hope to ignite a revolutionary moment,

a moment in history that rewrites the set of possibilities.

The beginning was splendid.

I remember immediately

after being sworn in by the President of the Republic,

I popped into the Prime Minister's office.

It was the first time I entered that room.

It was the first day in office.

I walked in, I looked at Alexis, he looked at me.

We sort of felt awkward being in that room.

We hugged. At the same time we looked at one another

and we said, "Oh my God, what have we done?

We are running this place now."

Immediately after that, it was just the two

of us in a large prime ministerial office,

he says to me, "Well, look around,

but don't get enamoured of it.

because these buildings were not made for us."

He said, "We were created

to be out there on the street demonstrating against

the people in these buildings.

So don't get too comfortable in here.

Let's always be ready to be out there."

And I remember feeling very touched, very moved.

I was almost in tears and we hugged again.

It was at moments like

that at the beginning when I thought we were invincible.

And I have no doubt that had we remained like that,

we would have been invincible.