Launch of Progressive International

Progressive International: Yanis Varoufakis & Bernie Sanders Launch New Global Mvt Against Far Right

quote:

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I wanted to ask you about that, because it seems that a common current, whether in Europe or the United States, of this rise of these new neofascists is the racialization of immigration as the new threat from the outside to our country, our nation, our patria, and in terms of how a progressive movement deals with how immigration from Africa, the Middle East and Latin America is being used to divide working people and to foment support for fascism.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Let’s be clear on something. Yes, they make a lot of noise about immigration, but immigration was never the issue. Let me give you an example. The loudest noises against the migrant, the foreigner, the refugee, come from places that don’t have any, like Hungary. They haven’t seen a refugee. They don’t know what a refugee looks like. And yet, that is where refugees are demonized, more than in Sicily or Lesbos, islands in the Mediterranean, that are swarming with refugees, and the local population is actually extremely solidaristic to them. So, it’s got nothing to do with flows. Let’s get this clear.

What it has to do with is with the fact that deflationary forces, unleashed by a vicious capitalist crisis, whether it is the 1930s or today, these deflationary forces, especially when they start touching the pension funds, the nest eggs of the middle class, they give rise to wonderful opportunities for advancement for demagogues, for those who stand on a soapbox and say, “I will make you proud again. It is the Jew, the Syrian, the German, the Greek—it doesn’t matter—the other, the left-handed person, the different. That we are going—if we get him—and it’s usually ’him’—if we get him, you know, we are going to be free, and your nation will—our nation is going to be proud again.”

So, let’s be clear: This is a symptom, it is not a cause. The cause is a capitalist crisis that was always going to hit us, given the inanity of the so-called growth model of globalization, of financialized globalization, before 2008, and the incredible cynicism with which that crisis was dealt with—or not dealt with—by the establishment.