Original subtitles

The surrender of our government in the summer of 2015

caused a wave of discontent

and depression, psychological depression,

not just in Greece, but outside of Greece too.

So many people in Spain, in Britain, in Germany

had been inspired by the possibility that the people

of a tiny nation could say "no" to the imposition

of misanthropic policies by the creditors —

the great institutions of capitalism.

That hope died that summer.

But of course, nothing really dies.

It just needs to be revived.

The question is how do you revive it?

After my resignation, I was receiving a lot of

pressure from colleagues, from members of

Parliament, here in Greece, to start a new party.

It was impossible for me to do it, psychologically.

The thought of it made me lose the will to live.

I needed to regroup, even within myself.

I had to rethink everything from scratch.

End of 2015, I found myself in Berlin

with a Croat philosopher who's become an excellent friend

of mine, Srećko Horvat.

And we went to have a coffee in a cafeteria

and he asked me, he said, "So, what are you going to do next?"

And I said, "I think a democratic pan-European movement is

what I would like to work on."

He said, "I agree. We have to do it."

I said, "Okay, yeah, but

we are two idiots having coffee in a cafeteria in Berlin.

How do we proceed from here?"

He said, "We're going to do it. I've got to go now."

So, we parted ways.

Next morning, he calls me. He says, "I booked the Volksbühne

for the 9th of February, 2016."

That was four or five months later. "You better prepare.

We better prepare." So, I thought, "What? This guy's mad.

We, the two of us, are going

to start a pan-European democratic movement?"

And then the idea started growing on me.

So, I started sending emails left, right

and centre, coming up with drafts of the manifesto,

thinking of the name of the movement,

and we decided to call this movement: the Democracy in Europe

Movement: DiEM25.

The old fashioned system

of creating a political party in the context

of the nation-state, making promises

that you cannot fulfil once you're in power,

if you ever gain government, that system is finished.

I have watched mighty finance ministers, including

this country's, being reduced to a state

of helplessness in the context

of the European Union Council, in the context

of the Eurogroup.

So, if we are right that another political party,

another organisation in the context

of the nation-states, is the wrong way to go,

what is the only alternative?

The only alternative is to

try something we've never tried before.

Okay, can we bring the people there?

Okay, guys, the rest of you, you wait here.

Sebastian will come here and he will bring you to

the other side of the stage. He's here?

Good. Okay. Caroline's here. Who else?

Miguel? No. Where the hell is Miguel. Find him.

I don't know. [INAUDIBLE] And Rita Vares? No. Erasmus. No.

[INAUDIBLE]

There's going to be videos [INAUDIBLE]. Caroline?

So what if we are utopian?

Doing nothing is not an option.

The dream of the marriage between capitalism

and democracy is over.

I was thinking about what we're trying to do here,

and it's a little bit like trying to cook a meal

that nobody's ever cooked.

So, I thought our motto could be, "Start

cooking, recipe to follow."

Let me just end with

paraphrasing Dylan Thomas,

something I like doing. Somebody asked, What is DiEM about?

Well, DiEM is about not going gently into the good night.

To rage, rage, and rage against the dying of the light.

Have a good night.

[INAUDIBLE] We exited the auditorium and we were elated.

We were on a high because months of work had paid off.

We had all these thousands, tens of thousands

of members on Day One.

So we headed to the bar for a celebratory drink.

Along our path, we came across an old German activist,

a man in his late seventies, early eighties,

who had spent time in prison.

He'd been a trade unionist, an activist on the far left.

He looked as pessimistic as he always does.

He's got this face exuding negativity,

but a wonderful heart.

So, I asked him, I said, "Klaus, what did you think of it?

What did you think of what we've just done?"

He nodded and said, "You will fail." Srećko, my colleague and comrade,

who is much younger than me, and therefore

a bit more agitated than I am,

got pissed off with him. And he said,

"So why are you here? Why are you here?

Why are you darkening our night

by being so negative?"

The answer he gave me is,

and has been since then, a great source

of personal strength for me.

He said, "Because I want to be around the people

with whom we will have, together, to pick up the pieces

when this whole thing collapses.

That, to me, is a good enough reason

to have a transnational pan-European democratic movement."

One of the difficulties, of course, is

that Syriza got their chance.

You got your chance,

but you only survived a matter of months

before, basically, chucking in the towel

and saying, "I can't put up with this.

This isn't what I came into politics for."

And that really is the test of the thing, isn't it?

Will people stay the course - as you describe this

revolution that's sweeping democracy in the world?

I didn't throw in the towel.

I just made the tactical decision

to move out of the ministry.

Politics, you know, is not something

that just happens in the corridors of power.

It's also what happens where I am: amongst

various democratic movements.

What we need is a Green New Deal for Europe

to create the good quality jobs

that will defeat climate disaster tomorrow morning.

The European Union has the instruments

that could be pressed into the service

of a genuine Green New Deal,

and I'll give numbers now.

£500 billion pounds every year at least.

This sounds like a lot of money. It is not.

Do you know how much money is sloshing

around in the City of London doing nothing?

Being uninvested?

It's about a £trillion pounds. So only in London.

Imagine in the whole of Europe.

It's about 4.5 trillion in Europe,

excess savings, liquidity, doing nothing other than bidding up

house prices and not doing what...

But the European Union has the institutions.

You have the European Investment Bank, which sounds boring,

and it is boring, and it is in Luxembourg, of all places.

That's really boring.

Is anybody here from Luxembourg? I'm sorry.

But do you know, it's four times

the size of the World Bank.

The financing of a Green New Deal will require

taxing wealth, ending tax havens, and so on,

but that will really not be at all enough.

Even if you introduce a wealth tax, like the one

that Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are

proposing in the United States, all you'll be able

to raise is about 1% of GDP.

It's good, but it's not enough.

We need 5, 6, 7% to have the green transition,

the creation of the good quality jobs that we need

in this country, in Europe and so on.

The main way of

energising this excess liquidity: public investment banks

that issue bonds that operate like sponges

that soak up the liquidity,

and the central banks just announcing to the market

so they will support the bonds issued

by the public investment banks.

That was the New Deal idea,

originally, of Franklin Roosevelt.

We had our European New Deal,

and, of course, we realised that the political system doesn't

give a damn about good ideas and good agendas.

Do you regret saying, "That's it. No more Troika,

no more bailout. It's over." It wasn't over.

Yeah, this is a fact, but it was not so easy too.

I know that the developments, the result,

whatever happened afterwards, it was not

a good development.

So my heart, my soul, said to me, "Go away."

But my mind said to me that I had to find a solution,

even though I knew

that this solution was very, very difficult

and tough.

So, after this very intensive internal democratic dialogue,

we agreed that we will go electoral, as we put it.

Right now, if one looks at the opinion polls,

out in front is the New Democracy party, the mainstream,

age-old, centre-right party. Your old party Syriza,

whom you worked for as Finance Minister,

the radical leftist government of the moment,

they're struggling in the polls.

But your own, even more radical progressive offering,

your new party, you're struggling

to get even a single percentage point

of the vote in the latest opinion poll.

Well, allow me to say that this is unfair

because we've just started the party.

Judge us at the election.

That's the only opinion poll - especially for a party

that is not even known

that it exists in Greece at the moment.

So, what are MeRA polling at right now?

How close are you?

Well, two days ago, we were on a knife's edge.

Yesterday and today we had some secret polls being

communicated with us that tell us that we're safe.

But, of course, opinion polls are like sausages.

If you know how they're made, you don't want to touch them.

That anniversary, in previous years, of the NO vote

of the referendum, every 5th of July has

always been a very difficult day for me personally.

Every 5th of July,

I've associated in my memory reading on my laptop a barrage

of attacks, on my own, struggling

to respond to each one of them, writing reams

and reams of responses — feisty responses —

because I wasn't letting them off the hook.

It was always a very sad and very lonely day.

So, when yesterday

I found myself, not in pristine isolation,

but amongst hundreds of supporters in central Athens Square

with that remarkable energy, solidarity, and optimism,

it was the first anniversary of the NO vote that

was not just pleasant

but a kind of rebirth, a regeneration,

a reinvention of whom we used to be.

Welcome to the MeRA25 headquarters,

the DiEM home base in Athens, Greece.

As you can see, it's very quiet right now

because tomorrow is election day, which means

that all campaign activities are on hold.

Sure. This is, I would say, the control centre

of the MeRA25 operation.

So, posters aside, this is a map

that will have all the key dates for the various tours that

Eric Edmond, whom you may have met, would've been doing,

travelling around in his vehicle, doing little rallies

and building small teams of grassroots

activists all over the country.

I know you've struggled to get funding for both DiEM and for MeRA,

that this has been a huge issue.

Okay. How have you managed?

On a shoestring.

We managed on a shoestring

because, in the end, it's true. Capital

does not flow into the coffers of parties

that work against the interests of financialised capitalism.

But what is, I think, quite remarkable,

is the kind of

campaign against us waged within the

banking system.

It took us six months to open a bank account.

They kept pretending that

some paperwork was missing.

And then, once they opened the bank account,

they did everything they could to make sure

that it is inoperable.

So, for instance, if you wanted

to make a donation using your MasterCard, your Visa,

you couldn't. If you wanted to do web banking, you couldn't.

The only way, they told us, that

anyone can make a donation is if they

stand and queue, they queue up,

at the cashiers. When some of our people try to do that,

the cashiers ask them for a letter from the party

authorising them to give us money.

Tomorrow morning, polls open at seven in the morning

and they shut at 7pm. We are going to have some

nail-biting moments after 7pm tomorrow

until the first results come out.

But, I still feel confident that we're going

to celebrate the return of the anti-austerity movement,

the Green New Deal, to Parliament for the first time.

The man who once promised he could end austerity, defy

Brussels and still keep his country in the Euro

conceded defeat tonight. Alexis TsÌpras was going

to transform politics in Greece. After four years,

the Greek people have said, "Enough.

Let's go back to the traditional parties."

How are you feeling?

Mixed feelings. I mean, of course, elated,

but at the same time, saddened. On the one hand,

we are elated that we are going

to put this voice in Parliament.

We're also elated that we bumped off Golden Dawn.

We pushed the Nazis out. At the same time,

there is a new fascist party coming in just ahead of us.

And, of course, it's impossible to celebrate,

given that now we have a new chapter

in this country's debt bondage,

with a ruthless neoliberal party in government

with an absolute majority that has the capacity, now,

on the foundation of the fourth bailout agreement

introduced by TsÌpras

and Syriza, our former comrades, to build

a class war against people who've lost almost everything.

MeRA25 is a tiny candle that has the capacity to pierce

the darkness, but the darkness is getting thicker.

It's quite spectacular. Greece became bankrupt, officially,

in 2010. Our debt

was something like 300 billion euros

and our income was around 240 billion euros,

and that was considered to be such a gap

that warranted calling Greece insolvent,

and making us headline news everywhere in the world.

Well, now the 300 billion debt is

370... 380, maybe,

and our income from 240 is 162,

and yet nobody talks about it as a case

of deepening insolvency.

Why? If the powers that be want to declare

that you're insolvent because they want to punish you

or they want to make you do things

or take away your stuff like, you know,

your airports and your ports and so on,

suddenly every newspaper in the world

talks about your insolvency.

Once they've taken away everything

and they have installed in Athens a government

which says 'yes' to them, to whatever demands

they imagine, right, then suddenly our debt is not a problem.

They keep rolling it over and rolling it over,

and they will keep rolling it over.

You see, debt is power. It's got nothing to do with money.

Unwelcome but expected,

the Coronavirus has hit the UK.

A SARS-like virus, which has infected hundreds in China,

has now reached the United States.

The pandemic's greatest lesson to all of us,

both on the left and on the right,

concerns the power of the state.

For years, we lulled ourselves into the belief that,

governments cease to have any power.

And the moment COVID-19 hits, suddenly we realise

the immense power of the nation state.

So, they, you know, they shut us indoors;

they imposed the curfew;

they closed down the economy;

they replaced the labour markets;

they renationalised everything

and, suddenly, we had more or less

a return to an absolute monarchy in terms

of the power of the state to do stuff.

Many claim that the pandemic is a crisis of its own,

a separate financial crisis.

I do not share that view.

I strongly believe that the great crisis

of our times began in 2008 which, as I keep saying,

was our generation's 1929,

and that that crisis never went away.

It migrated from one continent to the other

while mutating during its migration.

And 2008 was the moment

when future historians are going to mark the end,

the official end, of what we all knew as capitalism.

Something else has emerged.

For the first time, capitalism no longer depended

on capital accumulation, on profitability.

Instead, the wealth creation process

became utterly dependent

on the money printing by central banks.

This was then visited upon by the pandemic.

Think about what the Bank of England,

the European Central Bank, the Federal Reserve,

the Bank of Japan, of Sweden, of Switzerland...

what they did was more of the same.

They printed even more money.

They gave it to the same old defunct banks.

The same banks gave it

to the same large corporations like

Google, Volkswagen and so on.

Those corporations did not invest

that money in good quality jobs

or the green transition that humanity needs

or health or anything like that.

What they did is to go to the Stock Exchange

and buy back their own shares

and, in so doing, pushing up the financial markets

so, you have this complete decoupling

of the financial sector,

of the financial sphere, from the capital sphere.

This realisation hit me on the 12th of August

of 2020, when I saw what happened in London.

A few minutes after nine o'clock in the morning,

you had the announcement

that the British economy suffered its greatest

slump in the history of British capitalism.

More than 20% of GDP had been lost

during the lockdown.

And some, like, 15...16 minutes later,

the London Stock Exchange went up...

very significantly up.

That has never happened before.

To them it was good news.

They heard that the GDP of the United Kingdom fell

by 20 something percent,

and immediately they thought, "Excellent!

Because this means that the Bank of England are panicking

so they'll put in more money and they will give it to us

and we'll take it to the Stock Exchange and buy our own shares,

and the shares will go up.

Great. Let's buy some more. Good news!"

We've won with the most votes ever cast

on a presidential ticket in the history of the nation:

74 million!

What I find mesmerisingly interesting is that

which is missing from Biden's New Deal.

You will recall that the original FDR New Deal in 1933

had two main pillars.

One was a large scale investment programme.

Biden is emulating that. The second pillar of FDR

was institutional changes that amounted

to a war against the bankers.

That is completely absent from Biden's agenda.

So, when I am speaking of high finance

as a harmful factor in recent years,

I am speaking about the type of individual who speculates

with other people's money.

And you in Chicago know the kind I refer to.

The lack of a clash with the financial sector,

which should have taken the form

of demanding a write-off of debt;

the lack of interest by the Biden administration in doing that

does not constitute the kind of shift,

not just of income but also of wealth creation sources,

in order to stem the increased chances of Trump

or, somebody like Trump, making a triumphant return.

Our level of enthusiasm, the Trump...

whatever the hell you want to call us... the group, is way

— is off the charts.

I believe it's the highest in the history of elections. But...

Because we had Trump before, it's so easy

to become enthusiastic about Biden without recognising

what really needs to be done,

and that Biden is not interested in doing it

at a global scale or even at the level of the United States.

To put it bluntly, we need at least 10% of global GDP

to be spent on the green transition globally.

If the United States doesn't lead such a campaign

for an international Green New Deal, who will do it?

Even if he takes all this money

and spends it in electrifying

the car industry and the road system, which will be great,

it will still be a case

of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Trump became President of the United States

because there is a massive amount

of pain in this country, which is not seen on television,

which many of my democratic colleagues do not know

and do not talk about.

The life expectancy in the United States of America

has declined for the third straight year.

You have demagogues who deal with that pain

and say, "The problem is, is that

Mexican immigrant who's picking strawberries

for $8 an hour."

So, you take that anger and frustration

and hurt that people are feeling

and you turn them against people

who are in worse shape than you are.

Alright? And our job is to bring our people together to say,

"No. It is not some Mexican picking strawberries for

eight bucks an hour who is our enemy. It is Wall Street.

It is the fossil fuel industry. It is the drug companies.

It's the insurance companies.

Let's stand together and take those people on."

In the previous sections we were talking

about a Green New Deal.

If we do not succeed in the international Green New Deal,

not an American one, not a North American one,

not a white one, not a European Atlanticist Green New Deal,

but an international New Deal, ruin without end is going

to loom black across our lands, our rivers, our mountains.

We are now going to issue an open call

to all progressives in the world.

It is time to unite.

It is our historic duty to do it

because if you think about it, the bankers

have formed a bankers' international.

When I was talking to the creditors,

the lack of racism, the solidarity,

the coalescence between them was very impressive.

They were Austrian, Dutch, Irish, Spanish,

Portuguese, Greek, and they worked as one.

The fascists are forming a fascist

nationalist international. Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini,

Marine Le Pen, Boris Johnson,

Modi showed a remarkable capacity to organise,

and we are failing left, right, and centre.

The only people who have not tried to combine and

go along with the internationalism

which is innate in their ideology, is the progressives.

It is high time that the

Progressive International is formed.

Together,

we are here.

Friends, comrades, fellow internationalists,

wherever you are on this planet,

welcome to this inaugural

and historic summit of the Progressive International.

The progressive International has a crucial role to play

in determining which course history will follow.

With the fate of the human experiment

quite literally at stake.

I think this pandemic that we are going

to talk about here also today shows us that there is so

much need for greater international collaboration

among progressive forces.

We have to fight the old order in all its forms

with every breath in our bodies.

Part of the neo-fascist movements in the world

have to do with people's contempt

for neoliberal elites who lied to them,

that told them they stand for justice

and invoked Martin Luther King Jr.,

and ended up hanging out with Wall Street folk,

with war profiteers.

What we are witnessing today is effectively

a wall against democracy.

What is it that makes

human beings so obedient?

Let's not make them same mistakes over

and over again. Thank you

very much for this opportunity.

And we must really protect the women's struggle from

co-optation by the state and co-optation from capitalism.

I hope at the end of this summit

we will all remember that being a progressive,

in its very essence, is to choose to trust in humankind.

It is simply not enough to act locally.

It is essential. It is necessary

to act locally, but it is not enough.

You need to act globally as well.

The climate challenge is not leaving us.

It'll be right where we left it, really, when the

Coronavirus entered our lives,

and I am very worried that this will become a less priority

after the epidemic.

We need a global project to stop climate change

and to reverse the disaster

that humanity has inflicted upon the planet.

In the same way that climate change cannot be dealt with

by the Brits, by the Greeks, by the Americans,

by the Chinese alone,

poverty around the globe cannot be dealt with

just by one country, one jurisdiction.

Similarly with banking. There is no way you can

do away with the oxygen-sapping effect

of the City of London without dealing with the banking

crisis internationally,

without putting the financial genie in a bottle globally.

There is no way we can deal with

public debt in one country if we don't deal

with public debt more globally.

Once you realise that, you've got

to answer a very simple question.

Are you going to let the Davos globalists

run the world,

or are you going to create democratic institutions

and international distributions that are

scrutinised democratically by the peoples of the planet

in order to provide the global leadership,

which is essential for the perpetuation of the human race?

This is the dilemma we're facing.

There's no third option.

The idea of imposing limits

and caps on resource use in order

to stop destroying the planet;

the idea of redistributing income from the global north

to the global south as part of the process of

a green transition;

the idea of a monetary system that is designed for

the many, not for the few;

these ideas are prerequisites for the survival

of the human race. And they'd better be implemented,

honed, developed by a majority of

people in a majority of countries.

Many friends and foes say to me that,

"Your project is utopian.

It won't work." Well, be that as it may,

what should we do? Just be bystanders watching

the steady decline

and degeneration of our societies, our polities,

our communities? Or fight for that which, whether you win

or not, can sow the seeds of the next rennaissance.