Glezos

Monday 21 March 2016

When the Left Hated Mass Migration and Didn't 'Welcome All Refugees' Part One

WHEN THE LEFT HATED MASS MIGRATIONS AND DIDN’T ‘WELCOME ALL REFUGEES’: PART ONE

There was a time in the past when the Left hated immigrants and didn’t ‘Welcome All Refugees’. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, it became fashionable in the West to support mass migration in the name of helping the ‘poor’, promoting ‘diversity’ and combatting hate crimes all in the name of ‘tolerance’.
20 March 2016
When the Left Hated Mass Migrations and Didn’t ‘Welcome All Refugees’: Part One
“The purpose of this importation (of labour during a tailoring strıke in Britain) is the same as that of the importation of Indian coolies to Jamaica, namely the perpetuation of slavery. If the masters succeeded through the import of German labour, in nullifying the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to repercussions in England.”
-Karl Marx, 1866
Globalist pseudo-humanitarianism has now fully gone mainstream.
Never a day stops when bleeding heart humanitarians are on TV, in the media, on talk shows, towering above all and sundry selling us drowned or crying babies, people in tents on muddy and wet campsites, showing us images of boat people  either drowned or with life jackets whilst at the same time supporting the militarisation of everything. It’s as if the world has turned on its head and suddenly the migrant is now viewed as a new Promethian god recreating a new and better humanity from its old rotting corpse[i]. The core essence as to whom they are and why they are coming has been lost. No one questions the corporate propaganda campaign, journalists or politicians. The Left just repeats it.
But there was a time in the not too distant past when the migrant flows were deemed to bedubious and reactionary. Insofar as the Soviet Union existed the Left kept at arms bay from imperialist ‘humanitarianism’, now it’s as if all other issues no longer exist and this is their raison d’etre. Three historical cases from the recent past come to light: Cuba, Algeria and Vietnam. It’s the political equivalent of Goldman Sachs doing charity and donning a philanthropic costume, while at the same time looting pensions, destroying nations and exporting real economic and social genocide. Let no one be fooled times may have changed but the core essence of mass migration in the imperialist era remains the same. We will look at the first two in Part One and at Vietnam and the implications of  ‘Welcoming All Refugees’ in Part Two.
The Example of Cuba
The Cuban Revolution, which initially was more about agrarian land and democratic reforms against the hated neo-colonial Batista regime and eventually turned into a full blown Russian style revolution with the adoption of communism by Fidel Castro, had seen a two decades long period of a mass exodus by certain sections of the population. Initially, those that fled were close to Batista’s regime and after the failed US invasion in the Bay of Pigs thousands more fled. In total around 10% of Cuba’s population, 1m people fled. They mostly went across in boats to Miami USA.
The Heritage Foundation writes (emphasis added): “Since 1959, Cubans have been engaged in one of the most significant migrations, proportionally, in modern times. Over eight percent of the island's population has gone into exile with around 700,000 coming to the U.S. prior to 1980 in several phases. Between January 1, 1959 and the October 22, 1962 Missile Crisis, 248,070 migrated to the United States. In early 1959 members of the political and military elite fled, followed by members of the propertied and professional sectors, who by 1961 comprised 45 percent of the registrants with the Cuban Refugee Program”[ii].
Fidel Castro labelled all those fleeing as gusanos (worms), which is what in reality they were. They supported the re-invasion of Cuba, the overthrow of the revolutionary regime, and the return of the hated Batista dictatorship. Failure to achieve the overthrow of the Revolution they became involved in terrorist activity against Cuba and all those that traded with it. The assistance of the American security services was obviously invaluable.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970’s they went around bombing various targets even to the extent of bringing down a Cuban Airliner killing everyone on board[iii]. It was only with a change of US strategy towards Cuba, after it was clear that the Revolution couldn't be overthrown by force, that the US sponsored terrorist activity dried up in the 1980’s.
Nowadays with the large mass migrant flows into the EU, it is easy to entrap them into your own security service agenda as they are migrants. If they don’t do as you say, you can threaten to send them back to where they came from. Also, if they are on the margins of society and are dodgy characters back home, if they are caught by the police of the new country they are residing in, they can be turned and used by the security services for their own narrow agenda. So let no one be fooled that US/EU security services aren’t going to use migrant patsies to further their NWO agenda as after all some of them were recipients of US-EU aid in their respective countries, and have ulterior motives which may not be progressive, but doubly reactionary.  Without any checks or balances, any independent controls, any cross verification of stories anyone can claim anything about their past as they most certainly do, gaining  an asylum status brings in a certain number of privileges, not least to those who profit from this (rental agencies, politicians in kickbacks, businesses in the form of cheap labour etc.) and ensures that the right of permanent stay becomes the norm[iv].
Algeria
The example of Algeria, France’s main colony for decades, is illuminating for we have a mass exodus after independence of the old colonial settlers and as it illuminates the role of the French Left. While both Vietnam and Algeria were French colonies, Vietnam became half independent first but soon fell to neo-colonialism due to America’s intervention, and Algeria became fully independent. Yet they are both interrelated in terms of strategy and occupation.
Once the French lost Vietnam, withdrew and handed over the reins to American imperialism, they focused on Algeria. What Vietnam taught them was that they had to be doubly tough against the Algerian struggle for independence. At the time (1950’s) the French Communist Party wasn’t in government and there were two resistance groups in Algeria against the French occupation. Which one did the CP support? The one of course that ended up collaborating openly with the Occupation under De Gaulle’s France. Below we see the role of the French PCF:
“Nor was the French Communist Party’s record on Algeria any better. From the PCF’s original positive involvement in setting up the Algerian immigrant labourers’ organisation L’Etoile du Nord Africaine it was all downhill. The PCF described the revolt in Constantine as ‘fascist’, even after the natives had been bombed into submission. In 1956 it voted special powers to Guy Mollet’s socialist government to repress the Algerian revolution.[1] The PCF had opposed Algerian independence since Massali Hadj first proposed it in 1937. In 1955 the PCF complained against charges of disloyalty to the Algerians: ‘Have we not already shown that we support a policy of negotiation with the peoples of North Africa for the creation of a true “Union française"?’[2] — as if the Algerian people were demanding a true Union française! But with the outbreak of war, the PCF faced some criticism for this uncomradely betrayal of the Algerian people. Rather than take responsibility for the policy outright, they sought to deflect responsibility by shifting the blame onto the working class. In a speech to students, the PCF spokesman Laurent Casanova asked them to take into account ‘the spontaneous attitude of the French popular masses on the question’.[3] Writer Francis Jeanson, who undertook clandestine work for the FLN, remembers Casanova speaking more bluntly. ‘He used to say, “The working class is racist, colonialist and imperialist.”’[4] In fact it was the Communist Party above all that was responsible for spreading chauvinist attitudes towards the Algerian struggle amongst working class people. ‘Victims of the myth of French Algeria,’ wrote Fanon, ‘the parties of the Left create Algerian sections of the French political parties on Algerian territory’. The truth was that it was they, before it was the working class, who assumed the right of France to rule over Algeria. In fact, the Communist Party of Algeria (PCA) recruited heavily amongst white settlers in Bab el Oued and Belcourt, according to Michael Farrell, who also charges that many PCA members were later active in the reactionary OAS[v].
It was left to an obscure Greek Michel Raptis (Pablo) who was in exile in France to organise a solidarity movement with the Algerian revolution, organise tens of engineers around the world to go set up mobile arms production factories in neighbouring countries and to smuggle weapons in for the resistance[vi]. He was eventually caught trying to overthrow the Algerian economy by flooding it with fake French currency, was put on trial in Amsterdam, and had his French residency withdrawn being put in prison in Holland for two years. Between 1962 and 1965 he became a core minister of Ben Bella’s first liberation government and was instrumental in forcing the mass exodus of the over one million French settlers in Algeria those who became known as Pieds Noir[vii].
Pablo was put in prison and had his status revoked by Holland, and only a sole  British Labour MP came to his defence. This is what he said in justifying his support for Algerian Independence:
“I will limit myself to a few words on the Algerian drama, which is at the heart of the affair that you are judging, Monsieur President, Messieurs Judges. I wonder if the Christian and civilized men and women of Western Europe, wallowing in their current relative material comfort, realize deep down what has been going on for the past seven years in Algeria, what is currently happening in the hell of Angola, or the drama, for example, of the Congolese children dying of hunger in the thousands. If they realize to what point our civilization is
only a matter of an epidermis that it suffices to scratch for an incredible potential for cruelty, violence and injustice toward our brothers – the people of color cruelly oppressed and exploited – to escape”.
“Have we in Western Europe truly realized the horrors of the colonial war in Algeria, that fact that there have been seven years of massacres and torture, around a million deaths on the Algerian side, more than two million poor peasants chased from their villages, displaced, “regrouped” in temporary camps, more than 250,000 Algerian refugees in Morocco and Tunisia, most of whom are elderly, women, and children who are war orphans, more than 300,000 Algerians in prisons and concentration camps in France itself? Yet these figures appear in the official French press and the countless literary and other documents that have been produced by this colonial war, the most atrocious of our century[viii].”
Once Pablo joined the Ministerial Department of Agriculture, 1m French settlers fled the country out of a population of 10m Algerians by FMLN policy of land distribution. Agriculture was returned once more to its rightful owners, and food production was geared to the needs of the domestic economy as a priority, not to serve solely the interests of imperialist France[ix].
No subsequent French Left organisation led campaigns for the poor refugees from Algeria nor did they go round in a mass hysteria of ‘welcome the refugees’. This was obviously logical  as they didn’t do much to support the anti-colonial resistance despite having a Parliamentary representation and commanding a significant percentage in elections (being the number one party in 1945 with 5m votes!). After betting on the wrong horse in Algeria (and supporting Mejj Hadji) they sure as hell didn’t want to be seen supporting the Pieds Noir so they kept silent, as opposed to the experience in our times where supporting every last migrant is evidence of …socialism and the revolution around the corner! The Algerian events led to deep turmoil in many of the French PCF militants, as they were formally against imperialism but in practice defenders of colonial France.
Indeed, all the way till the early 1980’s the French Communist Party maintained a position of strict intransigence to waves of immigration to France and one could argue that this position predated the conflicts in East Germany today, with many attacks noted by towns with Communist Party mayors against the resettlement of migrants in their districts. The 1980’s French elections under the leadership of George Marchais was partly fought on the platform of No Open Borders. Up until early 2000 in Calais where the PCF had electoral strength, closing of the Sangatte migrant squatter camp was one of its priorities. As indeed it did[x].
The Algerian exodus was one of a pattern of post-colonial societies. They had to go through the motions of getting rid of the settlers just to develop as societies on a human level. Without that, they could go nowhere. Imperialism, of course, tried to put every hurdle in the way, but we didn’t live in the era where they would be labelled openly as ‘racists’. That came much later as evidenced when Mugabe got rid of white farmers who allegedly had their land …stolen from them, land which they acquired at the point of a gun.

Bibliography
Ian Birchall, Revolutionary History: European Revolutionaries and Algerian Independence 1954-1962








The War in Algeria 1961 Declaration of Michel Raptis at the Amsterdam Trial
Source: Sylvain Pattieu, Les Camarades des freres. Aris, Syllepse, 2002;
First Published: Quatriéme Internationale no. 14, November 1961;
Translated: for marxists.org by Mitch Abidor.



George Marchais, On Immigration https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG2BA9SxClM

Friday 11 March 2016

Will The Real Varoufakis Please Stand Up?

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts…
Shakespeare
09 March 2016
 Will the real Varoufakis please stand up?
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Never in history has a finance minister of a bankrupt state - who had pensioners queuing in 40c heat for their paltry pensions - been able to command so much hot air and press time and come out unscathed from the 3rd  Troika led Bailout of Greece.  Varoufakis appears to be the man in economics where nothing sticks.  Not a single anti-austerity measure was taken by him when he was Syriza’s finance minister so why is he feted and will now allegedly become an adviser to Britain’s Labour Party? Is it a case of the circus going global or something more sinister?
Early History
Politically associated with PASOK and an adviser of Papandreou between 2004 to 2007 - the period after PASOK came to power – Varoufakis helped de-industrialize Greece and set up Coca Cola’s Olympics which contributed massively to the country’s financial bankruptcy. After the mass protests and occupation of the squares in Greece in spring and summer of 2011, Varoufakis appeared on the stage alongside three other individuals: Katrougalos (current Syriza’s Pensions minister) Tsakalotos (current Finance Minister) and Kazakis (currently the leader of EPAM). His close political associate was a woman called  Eleni Panariti (of  World Bank notoriety) who earned her spurs with President Fujimori’s Peru and the mass looting of the Peruvian population in the early 1980’s.
In other words, Varoufakis belonged to the economic hitmen circle with relationships other than the interests of the nation they were supposed to serve. Varoufakis, a trained political con artist, can be anything to anyone and everything to someone. He can sell anti-austerity in speeches, rail against the evils of capitalism and debt servitude, and have as a close political associate a representative from the World Bank. It’s no coincidence that his nickname in Greek is Baroufakis - a play on the word Baroufa which in Greek means dumb.
A child of a senior manager who subsequently became a director of the Greek steel companyHalivdourgiki, Varoufakis was privately educated and basically  had an uneventful  academic career but somewhere along the way due to family connections he went on to serve US interests in Greece, which is what many Greeks who are part of the diaspora do, if they can find a way back, that is - if they are comfortable enough to be able to do so.
“I’m not going to betray my view, that I honed back in 2010, that this country must stop extending and pretending, we must stop taking on new loans pretending that we’ve solved the problem, when we haven’t; when we have made our debt even less sustainable on condition of further austerity that even further shrinks the economy; and shifts the burden further onto the have-nots, creating a humanitarian crisis. It’s something I’m not going to accept, I’m not going to be party to,” argued Varoufakis.
The global markets needed a diversion from the Wall Street crash of 2007-8. The centre could not be the main culprit so a peripheral country - Greece - would be found to play the role of Ifigeniaas a sacrificial lamb to the Gods of finance.  A country with less than 2% of EU’s GDP suddenly was at the centre of the global crash, was responsible for all manners of misdeeds and its working class were vilified for allegedly being pensioned off too early and not providing receipts when fixing lavatories. The level of analysis was so low that we were expected to believe in a new fairy tale like the one of 1929 when they claimed black dots on the sun led to the Wall Street crash. Varoufakis was recruited alongside Papandreou to play the role he subsequently did, the latter in bringing in the IMF to save Greece by economically destroying it and the former to save Greece by implementing austerity whilst verbally railing against it.  If real life was a circus Varoufakis and Papandreou would be the leading clowns taking on a double act.
Since when could a small peripheral country be the centre of a global crash? It’s like arguing that one’s primary school aged child bankrupted the family budget by spending too much on the pocket money. That’s how absurd it was.
Varoufakis as Finance Minister
Varoufakis wasn’t the head of Syriza’s Finance Team but was the appointed head of it by Tsipras. The head of Tsipras’ economics team Milios resigned early on from the position of being head of Syriza’s economics team.
If there was an economic programme and there clearly wasn’t, Varoufakis would have imposed a national programme of action after defaulting on the debt and calling the creditors bluff, of ‘less work but work for all’,  to ensure the 2m Greek unemployed who have no means of subsistence would be able to survive. Syriza in its pre-electoral programme alleged there would be a programme that would help those with no means of subsistence.  We are still waiting. This programme was allegedly squandered due to the demands of the Troika and Syriza accepting with Varoufakis an extension of the previous bailout in February 2015. Despite many mass demonstrations in defence of default and rupture with the Troika, Syriza never seriously had this agenda.
Illuminating in this process was the fact that when Tsakalotos, then a deputy finance minister, visited the British Parliament in a debate chaired by John Cruddas MP, he essentially argued there never was a left exit from the Eurozone. Anyone who argues for its break up is essentially from the far right. This wasn’t only Tsakalotos’ line. When Tsipras went to Austin Texas in November - to give a speech in Varoufakis’ base - he argued precisely the same point. A Grexit would be catastrophic for the Euro.[i] (4)
Syriza and its precursor Sinaspismos as analysed in the book Syriza – Neoliberals in Disguise(produced in early 2014) was from its birth a pro-EU party as they had voted for Maastricht and came from the strand known as ‘Eurocommunism’ i.e. absolute faith in the power of an unelected corporate bureaucracy based in Brussels which works solely for the big business interests of large transnational corporations that rule the world. The cornerstone of the EU is its four core principles: free trade in goods, capital, labour and services. This is what binds Varoufakis to the EU. He wholeheartedly believes in that process as is evidenced in his book The Global Minotaur in which the academic lingua franca of explaining globalization kicks by referring to standard textbook cases of the growth of Wall Mart and the rise Wall Street in something that could have been written by anyone in general.
During the first months of Syriza all we heard from the mass media was that we were running out of money and that everyone should pay as it was a patriotic duty. Month by month we got a breakdown of what was owed and what would be paid. There was not once a statement that we will default or that we will not sacrifice Greece anymore to the banksters. Ironically Paul Mason stated way back in January that the government had enough money for a few months. So whilst for internal consumption the end was coming, the reality was that Varoufakis’ role as Finance Minister was a show for internal consumption (the media created a bad boy image on a motorbike who was blanked by Dijsselbloemin with the infamous handshake played over and over by the media). Then a big hue and cry was made over emptying all council and university budgets for them to be handed over to the central government.
Capital Controls on Greek banks
From the moment Varoufakis became Finance Minister he could have imposed controls on the exodus of money but as if working in tandem with the ECB billions were allowed to flow out of Greece. When the fake referendum was called the banks had already closed their doors to withdrawals which were initially limited to $20 a day, then $60 daily and now to the amazing weekly amount of $420 in cash. Thousands of Greeks were seen to be queuing in the sun waiting to make paltry withdrawals from the ATM’s. The corporate media’s propaganda and the mass psychology of the banksters world was that if the ATM dried up everything would fall apart and keeping the ATM’s open signaled a… responsible government. Repudiating debts and returning to a Drachma currency could have provided whatever liquidity one needed in the short term until new agreements were reached with new countries in terms of trading.
But the blackmail was done to try and get the right outcome for the referendum which the corporate media was selling as being very tight (in the end it had a margin of error higher than 20% and nearer to 25%!). The 3m pensioners and the 700,000 government employees were the only ones with a regular and steady income, no talk was made about the 2m who were already removed from the ATM’s via unemployment or those who were underpaid, had to wait months to get payment etc. They obviously don’t exist and the calamity is only for new customers not old ones.
Any Finance Minister worth his salt would have resigned the moment the ECB shut down Greek banks, but Varoufakis being a literal clown (photographs in Hello magazine showed off his expensive villa, his travels on a motorbike, etc.) had no such inclination. He continued as if nothing happened.
Show me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are…
Varoufakis has been on record to state that Larry Summers and Norman Lamont are his friends (or are they his handlers?)
Here is an excerpt from one interview, there are so many noes one can keep up!
How did your friendship with Norman Lamont come about and do you have much in common aside from you wanting Grexit and him possibly wanting Brexit?
I am very proud of my friendship with Norman, both personally and politically. When the left and the right can meet on a human level and forge a common agenda on important topics, such as Europe, I think that bodes well for the world. When I was a young man living in the UK, I didn’t miss a single demonstration against Mrs. Thatcher’s government, which Norman was part of. He doesn’t regret his position and neither do I. So what do we have in common? The answer is a commitment to parliamentary democracy, to liberalism, to the sovereignty of parliament. Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t want Grexit and despite Norman veering voting in favour of Britain leaving the EU, he never allowed his own prejudices to colour his advice to me when I was a minister.[ii]
Who was Norman Lamont? A Rothschild man, Chairman of the Tory Party Bow group known as the Cambridge mafia, that ran the Tory party in Thatcher’s era as opposed to today’s crows who are known as the Bullingdon Club (also includes a Rothschild) that presided over the de-industrialisation of Britain and the infamous ERM debacle (when Britain was trying to join the single currency in the making) when the financier Soros crippled Britain to the tune of £1 billion and proved from then that the project for a capitalist United States of Europe was doomed to fail from day one. Lamont was also a member of a cold war security think tank called Le Cercle based in Washington which of course explain why he is Varoufakis personal friend. All roads nowadays lead to …Washington.[iii]
Labour Party adviser?
As Michael Nevradakis wrote in the past, since leaving Syriza Varoufakis has “in countless appearances and interviews in the media, kept parroting the same stale myths about Greece, such as the myth, which was proven a lie, that Greece had the highest rate of Porsche Cayenne ownership in the world”.
The Labour Party was taken over lock stock and barrel in the mid-1970s when it went into bed with the IMF. As a government it recruited and promoted a Scotland-born individual named McGregor who was to become infamous during the Thatcher years for closing down the coal mines. This McGregor was instrumental in setting up a joint US-EEC coordinating committee for industrialists to coordinate US-EU production. At the same time during his old days in the USA he was a trade union breaker, utilizing modern methods of surveillance, bribery, intimidation and media exposure to get the aim he wanted to get which was to immobilize trade unions. This was achieved in British Leyland, in British Steel, in the coup de grace which was the defeat of British coal workers, and in the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) which brought down the Tory government in 1974.
Varoufakis and Paul Mason seem to be in a marriage made in heaven with the Party which was instrumental before the rest of the EU in pioneering foreign imperialist military invasions (Serbia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan) with its partners in crime - the USA. Paul Mason sycophantic appraisals of Syriza were so ridiculous that Alexis Tsipras was painted like some Che Guevara figure in the Mediterranean. Once the absolute sellout was achieved in agreeing to the 3rdBailout, Mason dropped Syriza as the mission was accomplished in terms of propaganda and is off to … new pastures (or are they old?).
From the moment one of the Bullingdon boys (Osborne) can crack a joke at the expense of the Left, we know why Varoufakis and Mason may become advisers to the Labour Party to dispel the myth of any radical alternative policies. As Osborne said, “Corbyn recruited them as Chairman Mao was dead and Mickey Mouse busy”. We also know why Corbyn, despite formally opposing the EEC/EU, is now in favour of …Staying In.
Open Borders
In an appearance on the BBC One’s Question, Time Varoufakis defended Open Borders and showed zero concern for the native Greek population. Any amount of people could arrive as they did en masse.
We have two [thousand], three [thousand], 5,000, 10,000 people being washed up on our shores, on the Aegean Islands, every day. In a nation, by the way, that is buffeted by a great depression, where families, on those islands, in particular, are finding it very hard to put food on the table for their children at night.
And these people in their crushing majority, I’m proud to report, opened their doors to these wretched refugees. And the thought comes to my mind very simply: if somebody knocks on your door at three in the morning, and they’re wet, they’re bleeding, they’ve been shot at, and they’re frightened, what do you do? I think there’s only one answer: you open the door, and you give them shelter, independently of the cost-benefit analysis, independently of the chance that they may harm you.
Varoufakis supports the EU’s globalist pipedream of open borders everywhere as evidenced in the above piece in the Guardian. This is in line with Goldman Sachs who have their Managing Director in an important position in the United Nations Refugee Agency. It is also in line with thepronouncements of Soros that put him into conflict with the Prime Minister of Hungary Orban.
Varoufakis’ new European movement (DiEM25) is just an attempt to salvage with his fake left credentials the imploding EU. For if the powers that be assume they can double the population of the EU in one generation when there are 40m officially unemployed in the continent then they may need to wake up from their dreams. You would have to be politically comatose to believe another European New World Order - an Orwellian globalist free for all – as envisioned in the mind of Varoufakis can be implemented without severe social conflicts and a civil war type of disturbances. What was gained in blood - the right of nations to live in peace and trade with one another - cannot easily be erased by the stroke of a pen of unelected gauleiters in Brussels.

[i] Tsipras in Texas: Eurozone a Mistake, Exiting it a Disaster
[iii]  “Le Cercle is a foreign policy think-tank specialising in international security. Set up after World War II, the group has members from twenty-five countries and meets at least bi-annually, in Washington, D.C., United States. The group's current chairman is Norman Lamont, former British Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Cercle

Wednesday 9 March 2016

Varoufakis Diem 25: A Marxist Critique...

http://inclusivedemocracy.org/journal/vol12/vol12_no1_Diem25_manifesto_democratizing_europe_or_for_eu_elites_domination.html

DIEM25: A Manifesto for democratizing Europe or for perpetuating the EU elites’ domination of the European peoples?
—Towards a democratic community of sovereign nations

TAKIS FOTOPOULOS
(19.02.2016) 

AbstractIn the midst of huge publicity, particularly by the mass media of the globalist “Left” (i.e. the Left that is fully integrated into the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization) such as The Guardian, Y. Varoufakis – one of the protagonists of the present economic, political and social Greek catastrophe – presented himself as the ‘saviour of Europa’, as he was described by another well-known member of the same “Left” in an article published (of all places!) in RT.[1] In this article I will try, first, to examine the democratic credentials of this manifesto and, second, to explore its aims and strategy. Then, I will try to answer some crucial questions concerning the timing of this manifesto and who supports it. I will conclude with a proposal for a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations, which, to my mind, represents a real option now vs. the pseudo-options offered by this so-called ‘manifesto’, which, indirectly has already been approved by the elites.[2]

1. The pseudo-‘democratic’ credentials of DIEM25
Varoufakis begins his ‘manifesto’ by stating that “for all their concerns with global competitiveness, migration and terrorism, only one prospect truly terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy…for rule by Europe’s peoples, government by the demos, is the shared nightmare of the European elites.”[3] Then he makes clear what he means by this when he describes in detail who these elites are, namely:
  • The Brussels bureaucracy and its lobbyists,
  • Its hit-squad inspectorates and the Troika,
  • The powerful Eurogroup that has no standing in law or treaty,
  • Bailed-out bankers, fund managers and resurgent oligarchies,
  • Political parties appealing to liberalism, democracy, freedom and solidarity,
  • Governments that fuel cruel inequality by implementing austerity,
  • Media moguls who have turned fear-mongering into an art form,
  • Corporations in cahoots with secretive public agencies investing in the same fear to promote secrecy and a culture of surveillance that bend public opinion to their will.
As is obvious from this list, the EU elites are defined in purely political terms and, particularly, in terms of their power to manipulate ‘public opinion’ through the lack of transparency and the framework of secrecy within which mostly unelected EU organs dominate their ‘subjects’, i.e. the European peoples. In other words, the defining characteristic of the members of these elites is their political power, through which they can manipulate the European peoples to serve their aims.
What is NOT mentioned at all is, who the elites exercising economic powerare and what their role is in manipulating the decision-making process of the EU. That is, there is not a single word about the Transnational Corporations (TNCs), particularly those of European origin like the European Round Table of Industrialists, which consists of the main Transnational Corporations (TNCs) running the EU.[4] Similarly, there is no mention of the various international economic institutions which are controlled by the Transnational Elite[5] (i.e. the elites that are based in the G7 countries), namely the EU, WTO, IMF and World Bank, and their role – behind the scenes – in determining the EU’s decisions (economic and political as well as cultural).
In fact, the Manifesto does everything possible to stress the supposedly purely political nature of the “democracy” (which it mostly identifies with human rights!), as when it points out that “the European Union was an exceptional achievement (...) proving that it was possible to create a shared framework of human rights across a continent that was, not long ago, home to murderous chauvinism, racism and barbarity”. Even when the Manifesto tries to allude to economic elites, again it does not put the blame on the vastly unequal distribution of economic power on which the EU elites thrive, but on the unequal distribution of political power which, supposedly, makes it possible for the economic elites to exercise their power:
“A confederacy of myopic politicians, economically naïve officials and financially incompetent ‘experts’ submit slavishly to the edicts of financial and industrial conglomerates, alienating Europeans and stirring up a dangerous anti-European backlash (...) At the heart of our disintegrating EU there lies a guilty deceitA highly political, top-down, opaque decision-making process is presented as ‘apolitical’, ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ and ‘neutral’. Its purpose is to prevent Europeans from exercising democratic control over their money, finance, working conditions and environment”.[6]
It is therefore absolutely clear that, according to the Manifesto, it is the inequality in the distribution of political power that is the cause of all evil in the EU. This is a conclusion which, at best, betrays a complete ignorance of what democracy is really all about and, at worst, attempts to deceive the victims of globalization in Europe as to the real causes of their present ordeal. Needless to add that Varoufakis, as the ex-Finance Minister of the Greek government, knows a few things about political deception, since this is a government of unprecedented political crooks – as they are referred to by most Greeks currently in open revolt against the government, making it difficult for Ministers and Syriza parliamentarians to go about on the streets and forcing them to resort to the special riot police units for their protection. Yet Varoufakis has no qualms about discussing political deception, as when he emphasizes that “the price of this deceit is not merely the end of democracy but also poor economic policies”, by which he means – as he explains further on – the austerity policies implemented by the EU elites “resulting in permanent recession in the weaker countries and low investment in the core countries” (a misconception that I will consider below) and “unprecedented inequality”. So, we learn that the present unprecedented inequality is not the inevitable result of the opening and liberalization of markets implied by globalization, but simply the outcome of the ‘guilty deceit’ he describes, supposedly due to the ‘non-democratic’ character of the EU apparatus.
However, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[7] if we define political democracy as the authority of the people (demos) in the political sphere a fact that implies political equality  then economic democracy could be correspondingly defined as the authority of the demos in the economic sphere  a fact that implies economic equality. Economic democracy therefore relates to every social system that institutionalizes the integration of society with the economy. This means that, ultimately, the demos controls the economic process, within an institutional framework ofdemotic ownership of the means of production. In a narrower sense, economic democracy also relates to every social system that institutionalizes the minimization of socio-economic differences, particularly those arising from the unequal distribution of private property and the consequent unequal distribution of income and wealth (as the old social-democratic parties used to preach). It is obvious that economic democracy refers both to the mode of production and to the distribution of the social product and wealth.
In this sense, the EU apparatus is not, and could never be, a democracy within an institutional framework that secures the unequal distribution of economic power, as the NWO of neoliberal globalization does. To put it simply, as long as a minority of people own and control the means of production and distribution, it is this minority (or elite) that will take all the important economic decisions, and not the political elite who crucially depend on the former for the funding of their expensive election campaigns, or for their promotion through the mass media which the economic elites also control and so on. Yet one of Varoufakis’s main supporters (and one of his political advisers when in government, presumably at the expense of the Greek people), James K Galbraith  a well-known member of the globalist “Left”  did not hesitate to compare how democratic the US Congress is in relation to the EU apparatus:
“what struck me in particular from the standpoint of a veteran of the congressional staff was the near-complete absence of procedural safeguards, of accountability, of record-keeping, of transparency, and also the practical absence of an independent and sceptical press. These are the elementary functional components of a working democracy, and their absence is an enormous obstacle to the progress of democracy in Europe, and are therefore, an excellent place to begin”.[8]
So, according to this criterion of democracy (transparency etc.), which is also the Manifesto’s main criterion, the model for EU democracy should be the absolute degradation of any concept of democracy which US institutions in fact represent — whereby Congressmen and the President himself are elected according to how much support they can muster from the economic elites (funding, mass media support etc)!
2. The aims of “authentic democracy” and the strategy of DIEM25
Having described this parody (or rather complete distortion) of the concept of democracy as “authentic” democracy, the Manifesto then proceeds to define, in chronological order, the aims of the DIEM25 movement.
A. IMMEDIATELY
The immediate aim is “full transparency in decision-making”, i.e. the publication of the minutes of EU institutions, the online uploading of important documents, the monitoring of lobbyists etc. Any comments here would obviously be superfluous, as it is clear that the reason such a petty aim is associated with ‘authentic’ democracy is clearly to distract people from the real conditions which must be met for political power to be distributed equally among all citizens.
B. WITHIN TWELVE MONTHS
The aim here is to address the ongoing economic crisis “utilizing existing institutions and within existing EU Treaties”. The proposed policies, according to the Manifesto, “will be aimed at re-deploying existing institutions (through a creative re-interpretation of existing treaties and charters) in order to stabilize the crises of public debt, banking, inadequate investment, and rising poverty”.
However, it can be shown that it is the EU institutions themselves that have created these crises, which therefore can never be ‘stabilized’ within the existing institutions and treaties. Thus it can be demonstrated that, since the present globalization developed under conditions of capitalist ownership and control of the means of production, it could only be neoliberal. It is the proliferation of multinationals (or Transnational Corporations -TNCs), from the mid-1970s onwards, which has led to the phenomenon of neoliberal globalization (no relation to the failed attempt at globalization in the early 20th century).[9] The vast expansion of the TNCs necessitated the opening and liberalization of markets for goods, services, capital and labor. The opening of capital markets was initially informally achieved by the TNCs “from below” (the Euro-dollar market, etc.) before being institutionalized, first in Britain and the US through Thatcherism and Reaganism correspondingly, and then through the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and of course the EU, worldwide. Needless to say that when the economic mechanisms (i.e. economic violence) have not been enough to integrate a country into the NWO, the TE  i.e. the economic, political, media and academic elites based in the countries (mainly the “G7”) where the large TNCs are headquartered (not in the formal legal sense),  has had no qualms about using brutal physical violence to incorporate them by force (e.g. Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria, etc.).
However, the opening and liberalization of markets brought about a structural change in the capitalist economic model, which most Marxists (I refer to the remaining anti-systemic Marxists  apart from some notable exceptions like Leslie Sklair  and not the pseudo-Marxists of the globalist “Left”) have failed to understand. Hence, they cannot see the direct link between neoliberalism and the opening/liberalization of markets: it can be shown that the famous “four freedoms”, i.e. the opening and liberalization of markets (for capital, goods, services and labor) that were institutionalised first by the EU Maastricht Treaty and those following it, were the ultimate cause of all the present EU crises (debt crises, rising inequality and unemployment as well as the refugee crisis).[10] In other words, these Marxists cannot see that throughout the pre-globalization part of the post-war period from 1945-1975, the capitalist development model was based essentially on the internal market. This meant that the control of aggregate demand policies and especially fiscal policies (regarding taxation but also, more importantly, public spending  including public investment, social spending and the welfare state), played a critical role in determining national income and employment levels. In contrast, in the globalization era that followed with the opening and liberalization of markets, the basis of growth shifted from the internal to the external market. This meant that competitiveness became the key criterion for the success of a capitalist market economy and, consequently, the multinationals now play a key role in the growth process through the investments that they essentially finance, as well as through the expansion of exports that can be brought about by the installation of affiliates in a country. The EU is, of course, the main expression of neoliberal globalization in the European space.
In this context, it is not the austerity policies imposed by some ‘baddies’ in the political and economic elites that are the cause of the present low growth economy, just because they do not wish to adopt Keynesian policies to expand incomes and demand[11]. The austerity policies are simply the symptom of globalization in the sense that, if competitiveness cannot improve through more investment based on research and development, then, in case such investment is lacking, the alternative “cheap” way to achieve the same result is through the suppression of domestic wages and prices, by means of austerity policies of some sort. In fact, today it is not only naïve economists belonging to the globalist “Left” who support Keynesian policies, presumably because they still live in a nation-state time capsule where such policies and all its ideological paraphernalia are promoted, but even Nobel laureates in economics. Of course in the latter case one cannot talk about naivety but, rather, deliberate disorientation. For instance, Paul Krugman, in a recent article in the Guardian[12]  the flagship of the globalist “Left”  systematically attempts to bypass the crucial issues of our era and particularly globalization and its neoliberal ideology, preferring to concentrate instead on the austerity ‘delusion’ or ‘obsession’ of policy makers, particularly in the UK  conveniently ‘forgetting’ that these are also the EU’s policies, as well as those of the US since Reagan. In other words, he ignores the fact that these are the policies of the Transnational Elite imposed, one way or another, on every country integrated into the NWO.
C. WITHIN TWO YEARS
A Constitutional Assembly should be convened consisting of “representatives” from national assemblies (Parliaments), regional assemblies and municipal councils. The resulting Constitutional Assembly, according to the ‘Manifesto’, would be empowered to decide on a future democratic constitution that would replace all existing European Treaties within a decade. Here it is obvious that the author of the ‘Manifesto’ has no idea whatsoever about the meaning of classical democracy or the concept of demos which he so extensively uses, and yet he has no qualms about identifying representative “democracy” with classical democracy!
In fact, it was only during the sixteenth century that the idea of representation entered the political lexicon, although the sovereignty of Parliament was not established until the seventeenth century. In the same way that the king had once ‘represented’ society as a whole, it was now the turn of Parliament to play this role, although sovereignty itself was still supposed to belong to the people as a whole. The doctrine that prevailed in Europe after the French revolution was not just that the French people were sovereign and that their views were represented in the National Assembly, but that the French nation was sovereign and the National Assembly embodied the will of the nation. As it was observed,
“this was a turning point in continental European ideas since, before this, the political representative had been viewed in the continent as a delegate. According to the new theory promulgated by the French revolutionaries (...) the elected representative is viewed as an independent maker of national laws and policies, not as an agent for his constituents or for sectional interests”.[13]
Actually, one may say that the form of liberal ‘democracy’ that has dominated the West in the last two centuries is not even a representative ‘democracy’ but a representative government, that is, a government of the people by their representativesThus, as Bhikhu Parekh points out:
“Representatives were to be elected by the people, but once elected they were to remain free to manage public affairs as they saw fit. This highly effective way of insulating the government against the full impact of universal franchise lies at the heart of liberal democracy. Strictly speaking liberal democracy is not representative democracy but representativegovernment”.[14]
The European conception of sovereignty was completely alien to the Athenian conception, where the separation of sovereignty from its exercise was unknown. All powers were exercised directly by the citizens themselves, or by delegates who were appointed by lot and for a short period of time. In fact, as Aristotle points out, the election by voting was considered oligarchic and was not allowed but in exceptional circumstances (usually in cases where special knowledge was required), and only appointment by lot was considered democratic.[15] Therefore, the type of ‘democracy’ that has been established since the sixteenth century in Europe has had very little in common with the classical (Athenian) democracy. The former presupposes the separation of the state from society and the exercise of sovereignty by a separate body of representatives, whereas the latter is based on the principle that sovereignty is exercised directly by the free citizens themselves. Athens, therefore, may hardly be characterised as a state in the normal sense of the word.
D. BY 2025: ENACTMENT OF THE DECISIONS OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL ASSEMBLY
Therefore, the ultimate aim of the process envisaged by DIEM25 is PURE DECEPTION, and Y. Varoufakis has shown in his career as a Finance Minister that he is a master of this. He claims that the Constitutional Assembly (or ‘We, the peoples of Europe’ as he calls it, copying the American Constitution) will bring about the ‘radical’ change envisaged by the Manifesto. Yet the American case is hardly a model for democracy, as A. Birch pointed out: “the American Founding Fathers Madison and Jefferson were sceptical of democracy, precisely because of its Greek connotation of direct rule. This is why they preferred to call the American system republican, because “the term was thought to be more appropriate to the balanced constitution that had been adopted in 1787 than the term democratic, with its connotations of lower-class dominance.”[16] As John Dunn aptly stressed while describing the aim of representative ‘democracy’:
“It is important to recognize that the modern state was constructed, painstakingly and purposefully, above all by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, for the express purpose of denying that any given population, any people, had either the capacity or the right to act together for themselves, either independently of, or against their sovereign. The central point of the concept was to deny the very possibility that any demos (let alone one on the demographic scale of a European territorial monarchy) could be a genuine political agent, could act at all, let alone act with sufficiently continuous identity and practical coherence for it to be able to rule itself (...) the idea of the modern state was invented precisely to repudiate the possible coherence of democratic claims to rule, or even take genuinely political action (...) representative democracy is democracy made safe for the modern state.”[17]
Clearly then, what Varoufakis had in mind with his ‘Manifesto’ was simply to repeat the American Founding Fathers’ deception and create another ‘democratic’ monster, like his beloved American one, in Europe! Unsurprisingly, he tries to hide the fact that what he talks about has nothing to do with classical democracy, despite the misleading terminology he uses (demos etc). Thus, as he stresses, “we consider the model of national parties which form flimsy alliances at the level of the European Parliament to be obsolete”. He then goes on effectively to negate this statement by saying:
“While the fight for democracy-from-below (at the local, regional or national levels) is necessary, it is nevertheless insufficient if it is conducted without an internationalist strategy toward a pan-European coalition for democratizing Europe. European democrats must come together first, forge a common agenda, and then find ways of connecting it with local communities and at the regional and national level.”[18]
It is therefore obvious that his aim is purely to save the EU, rather than democracy, as he knows very well that the process he suggests could never lead to a democracy from below. Such a democracy could only start from the local level and then local demoi could federalise into democratic regions, nations and finally a democratic Europe. Not the other way around as he deceptively suggests, particularly when we are talking about a continent which, unlike the USA, consists of a multiplicity of peoples with different languages, culture and history. Varoufakis states that:
“our overarching aim to democratize the European Union is intertwined with an ambition to promote self-government (economic, political and social) at the local, municipal, regional and national levels; to throw open the corridors of power to the public; to embrace social and civic movements; and to emancipate all levels of government from bureaucratic and corporate power”[19]
What he actually has in mind here is to deceive people into thinking that they are fighting for a conversion of the EU into a democracy through some sort of decentralization of power to the local, municipal, regional and national levels (in fact the EU is also supposed to encourage such decentralization!), while of course the economic and political elites will continue to monopolize economic and political power, exactly as at present.
3. Why such a manifesto now? The rise of the neo-nationalist movement
One reasonable question arising with respect to the timing of the ‘Manifesto’ is why such a manifesto for the “democratization” of the EU should be necessary at this particular moment. Given that this is not really a manifesto for the democratization of Europe but, rather, an attempt to promote the EU, as we saw above, the motives behind this pseudo-manifesto are now clear. Particularly so if we consider that this is in fact the moment of truth for the EU, not just because of the refugee problem, but also because of the Eurozone crisis, the possibility of the UK exiting from the EU and so on. Yet all these crises are not ‘external’ to the EU crises, but have actually been created by the EU itself and its institutions.
The opening of the labor market within the EU and the removal of border controls through the Shengen agreement was one of the main causes of the refugee problem. However, a decisive role in this was also played by the EU elites, as part of the Transnational Elite, which destroyed the stable Ba’athist regimes in both Iraq and Syria, as well as the Libyan regime. The TE’s sole aim here was “regime change”, i.e. to integrate all these peoples who were resisting the NWO as they fought to maintain their national sovereignty.
Then, it was the institutions of the Eurozone itself which created the Eurozone crisis, the debt crisis and the massive rise in unemployment and poverty. As I have shown elsewhere,[20] these institutions were tailor-made to create a mechanism for the transfer of economic surplus from the less developed members of the Eurozone (eg. Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain) to the more advanced ones, particularly Germany.
Similarly, it is the resentment of the British people at the loss of their national sovereignty within the EU (despite the fact that the British elites are a constituent part of the Transnational Elite), which has led to a growing anti-EU movement in Britain that may well lead to a Brexit  an event which could have catalytic implications for the EU itself. This is particularly because, as the British elites themselves recognize, the anti-EU movement in Britain is actually a movement against globalization (a fact that the Globalist “Left” ignores), which could also explain the rise of the nationalist UKIP party:
“The surge in support for UKIP is not simply a protest vote. The party has a constituency among those left behind by globalization (...) the globalization of the economy has produced losers as well as winners. As a rule the winners are among the better off and the losers among the least affluent.”[21]
The same process is being repeated almost everywhere in Europe today, inevitably leading many people (particularly the working class) to join the neo-nationalist Right. This is not of course because they have suddenly became “nationalists”, let alone “fascists” (as the globalist “Left” accuses them in order to ostracize them!), but simply because the present globalist “Left” does not wish to lead the struggle against globalization while, at the same time, the popular strata have realized that national and economic sovereignty are incompatible with globalization. This is a fact fully realized, for example, by the strong patriotic movement in Russia, which encompasses all those opposing the integration of the country into the NWO  from nationalists to communists and from orthodox Christians to secularists  while the Putin leadership is trying to accommodate both the very powerful globalist part of the elite (the oligarchs, mass media, social media etc.) and this patriotic movement.
But it is mainly Le Pen’s National Front party, more than any other neo-nationalist party in the West, that has realized that globalization and membership of the NWΟ’s institutions are incompatible with national sovereignty. As she recently stressed, (in a way that the “Left” stopped doing long ago!):
“Globalization is a barbarity, it is the country which should limit its abuses and regulate it [globalization].” (...) Today the world is in the hands of multinational corporations and large international finance” (...) Immigration “weighs down on wages,” while the minimum wage is now becoming the maximum wage”.[22]
In fact, the French National Front is now the most important nationalist party in Europe and it may well be in power following the next Presidential elections in 2017, unless of course a united front consisting of all the globalist parties  with support from the entire TE and particularly the Euro-elites and the mass media controlled by them  prevents it from doing so. This is how Florian Philippot, the FN’s vice-president and chief strategist, aptly put forward the Front’s case in a FT interview:
“The people who always voted for the left, who believed in the left and who thought that it represented an improvement in salaries and pensions, social and economic progress, industrial policies (...) these people have realized that they were misled.”[23]
As the same FT report points out, to some observers of French politics the FN’s economic policies  which include exiting the euro and putting up trade barriers to protect industry  read like something copied from a 1930s political manifesto, while Christian Saint-Étienne, an economist for the newspaper Le Figaro, recently described this vision as “Peronist Marxism”. [24] In fact, in a more recent FT interview Marine Le Pen, the FN president, went one step further by calling for the nationalization of the banks, in addition to an exit from the Euro (which, she expects, would lead to its collapse, if not to the collapse of the EU itself which she welcomes), while also championing public services and presenting herself as the protector of workers and farmers in the face of “wild and anarchic globalization…which has brought more pain than happiness”.[25] By comparison, it never even occurred to SYRIZA and Y. Varoufakis to use such slogans before the elections - let alone after the second general election when it fully endorsed all the EU elites’ and the Troika’s policies which, before the first general election, it had promised to reverse! Needless to say that Le Pen’s foreign policy is also very different to that of the French establishment (and of course that of the EU elites), as she wants a radical overhaul of French foreign policy in which relations with the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad would be restored and relations with the likes of Qatar and Turkey which, she alleges, support terrorism, would be reviewed. At the same time, Le Pen sees the US as a purveyor of dangerous policies and Russia as a more suitable friend.
On top of all this, G. Soros (who is behind every ‘color revolution’ on Earth with the myriad of NGOs etc which he funds  it would not be surprising if we later learn that he is also funding the movement behind DM25)  has written an article also published by the flagship of the globalist “left”, The Guardian (which has repeatedly promoted Varoufakis massively) entitled, “Putin is a bigger threat to Europe’s existence than Isis”! [26]
4. The bankruptcy of the Globalist ‘Left’ and the ‘Manifesto’
It goes without saying that this neo-nationalist movement, which is usually an explicitly anti-EU movement as well, is presently engulfing almost every EU country. The unifying element among the neo-nationalists is their struggle for national and economic sovereignty, which they rightly see as disappearing in the era of globalization. Although sometimes their main immediate motive is the fight against immigration, it is clear that they are misguided in this as they usually do not realize that it is the opening up of all markets, including the labor markets particularly within economic unions like the EU, that is the direct cause of their own unemployment or low-wage employment. In other words, this is not a racist movement as such but a purely economic movement, although the Transnational and Zionist elites, with the help of the globalist “Left”, are trying hard to convert it into an Islamophobic movement  as the Charlie Hebdo case clearly showed  so that they can use it however they see fit in their support of the NWO. Inevitably, Islamophobic  if not racist  trends have also developed within some of these neo-nationalist movements. As we shall see in the last section of this article, this is one more reason why Popular Fronts for National and Social Liberation must be built in every country to fight not only the EU and the NWO  which is of course the main enemy  but also any racist trends developing within this new anti-globalization movement. This would also prevent the elites from using the historically well-tested practice of ‘divide and rule’ to create conflict between the victims of globalization.
This movement is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class that used to support the Left[27], whilst the latter has effectively embraced not just economic globalization but also political, ideological and cultural globalization and has therefore been fully integrated into the New World Order  a defining moment in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy. The process of the Left’s bankruptcy has been further enhanced by the fact that, faced with political collapse in the May 2014 Euro-parliamentary elections, it allied itself with the elites in condemning the neo-nationalist parties as fascist and neo-Nazi, while in extreme cases it has even consented to the use of blatantly fascist methods in order to suppress some of them (e.g. the Golden Dawn party in Greece).
However, today, following the successful emasculation of the antisystemic movement against globalization (mainly through the World Social Forum, thanks to the activities of the globalist “Left”),[28] it is up to the neo-nationalist movement to fight globalization in general and the EU in particular. It is therefore clear that the neo-nationalist parties which are, in fact, all under attack by the TE, constitute cases of movements that have simply filled the huge gap created by the globalist “Left”. Instead of placing itself in the front line among all those peoples fighting globalization and the phasing out of their economic and national sovereignty, this “Left” has indirectly promoted globalization, using arguments based on an anachronistic internationalism supposedly founded on Marxism.
As one might expect, most members of the Globalist “Left” have joined the new movement to ‘democratize’ Europe, “forgetting” that ‘Democracy’ was also the West’s propaganda excuse for destroying Iraq, Libya and now Syria. Today it seems that the Soros circus is aiming to use exactly the same excuse to destroy Europe, in the sense of securing the perpetuation of the EU elites’ domination of the European peoples.
The most prominent members of the globalist “Left” who have already joined this new ‘movement’ range from Julian Assange to Suzan George and Toni Negri, and from Hillary Wainwright of Red Pepper toCounterPunch and other globalist “Left” newspapers and journals all over the world. In this context, it is particularly interesting to refer to Slavoj Žižek’s commentary on the ‘Manifesto’ that was presented at the inaugural meeting of Varoufakis’s new movement in Berlin on February 2016. This commentary was greeted enthusiastically by Varoufakis’s globalist “Left” supporters. Zizek began by blatantly attempting to deceive the audience with respect to Syriza’s rise to power. He talked about a ‘defeat’ but he added, “I don't blame them, their situation was hopeless from the beginning”. Of course, he did not mention that the situation was hopeless only because SYRIZA took for granted what actually needed to be changed, if they were to realize their promises to reverse the austerity policies imposed by the Troika, to ‘tear up’ the Mamoranda along with them, to stop privatizations and so on. That is, SYRIZA took for granted Greece’s membership of the EU and the Eurozone and, accordingly, never prepared for a “Plan B” so that, as soon as the European Central Bank began cutting off liquidity (which led to capital controls that still continue to this day), they could have re-introduced the drachma. Varoufakis, who was Finance Minister at the time, said that he “had it in mind” and that he discussed it with close associates, but of course he never thought to resign when he discovered that his “plan” was not accepted. Instead, he resigned (or, more likely, was forced to resign) only after the ‘defeat’  as Zizek euphemestically called it – had become inevitable.
Zizek then launched a vitriolic attack on the rising neo-nationalist movement (as the entire globalist “Left” is currently doing, ‘inspired’ by Soros and other members of the TE):
“Sometimes even if you rationally know the situation is hopeless you have to experience it. The lesson was a very important one of the defeat of syriza, the lesson was the crucial step forward, the way to undermine global capitalism cannot be done at the level of nation states. There is a great temptation now all around Europe, a kind of neo-keynesian social democratic nationalist temptation, the idea is since we live in a global market, and this means international relations are dominated by the logic of capital, the only hope is to return to a stronger nation state, with all this implies a certain level of nationalism/populism and we establish again strong nation states which impose their own laws, regulate their own financial policy and so on and so on. That illusion has to be abandoned I claim. And this is why I think what DIEM is doing is strictly linked to the failure of syriza (...)”[29]
In fact, along the same lines the Manifesto itself stresses that, “Two dreadful options dominate: Retreat into the cocoon of our nation-states, or surrender to the Brussels democracy-free zone”. Yet this is a pseudo-dilemma or, more to the point, a highly deceptive description of the actual choices involved, as we shall see in the next section which will present a real third option, unlike the “Manifesto”. But before we do this, let us see the highly deceitful way in which Zizek attempted to justify the globalist “Left’s” approach which is, in fact, a celebration of the NWO.
In his commentary at the DIEM25 meeting, he stressed that “our only hope is to engage in very concrete very specific acts, we have to choose very well our concrete act, our concrete demand (...) that is the art to demand something relatively modest, but if you follow to the end this demand, everything will fall apart. You open up the path to general rearrangement of social relations.”
Of course, for anybody with an elementary knowledge of what is going on at present in Greece this can only be taken, at best, as a joke and, at worst, as a deliberate attempt to justify SYRIZA’s criminal policies. These simply aim to execute every single order that comes from the EU (perhaps with some minor modifications accepted in advance by the Troika to create the pretence of negotiations) in order to satisfy the Transnational Elites’ lenders as represented by the Troika. The aims currently pursued by the elites, according to the new Memorandum (perhaps the worst ever) signed by SYRIZA in July, include:
  • the effective smashing of farmers’ incomes with heavy taxation and the destruction of their pension system (they are presently blocking all the main roads and the “Leftist” government is using the special riot units to ‘control’ them)
  • the actual pauperization of pensioners of all kinds (demonstrations over this issue are occurring daily in Athens)
  • the sell-out of all social wealth, starting with seaports and airports etc.
It is clear now to everybody that SYRIZA’s only aim is power for power’s sake. No wonder that Greece, a country with a very strong Left tradition historically, may soon see the destruction of its Left movement altogether (given in particular the fact that KKE  the Greek Communist Party engages in strong rhetoric not matched by its actions), with most people turning to political apathy. In fact the abstention rate in the last election, following the signing of the new Memorandum by SYRIZA, was at an all-time high!
Of course Zizek’s stand on SYRIZA and the ‘Manifesto’ in general is far from unexpected. In advocating the need for a “big” socio-economic revolution within Arab countries (in contrast to his present position), he indirectly supported the campaigns for regime change in Libya and Syria. He also did this directly when he adopted the western propaganda that Libya and Syria were governed by “dictators”  not bothering (despite his high qualifications) to examine the history of these regimes, which were backed by strong national liberation movements and had really achieved significant social changes. Then, he celebrated the Ukrainian “revolution” in Kiev[30], together with the likes of Victoria Nuland and John McCain,fully revealing to which camp he really belongs. No wonder that he never proposed any concrete alternatives to the present system, as a system, but instead just promoted changes guaranteeing the protection of human rights as every good supporter of the ideology of globalization does  or talked about communism as an abstract ideal without ever attempting to specify the preconditions for it, let alone any transitional strategy towards achieving it!
5. Towards a Democratic Community of Sovereign Nations[31]
It is clear that the social struggle in the era of neoliberal globalization can no longer be just a struggle for social liberation, as obsolete Marxists still believe today and some Trotskyites have always believed. This becomes obvious when one considers the fact that, as soon as country (not belonging to the Transnational Elite, i.e. mainly the "G7") is integrated intothe NWO of neoliberal globalizationit loses every trace of economic and, consequently, national sovereignty, either because it has to obey the EU rules (in Europe) or the WTO and IMF rules (in the rest of the world), as well as the orders given by capitalist lenders, bankers and the TNC’s executives, of course. This is why the struggle for social liberation today is inconceivable unless it has already gone through national liberationTheoccupying troops that are now destroying and ‘plundering’ countries likeGreece, Portugal, Spain, Argentina etc, as well as the weakest social stratain all countries, even the most economically advanced ones (with the full cooperation of small, local privileged elites which control the mediathe political partiesthe “Left” intelligentsia etc.), are not a regular army inuniform with lethal weapons of physical violence at their disposal. The occupying army today is an economic army in suits, possessing equallylethal instruments of economic violence, as well as the means (the mass media and social media, NGOs etc) to justify it.
So, at this crucial historical juncture that will determine whether we shall all become subservient to neoliberal globalization and the transnational elite (as the DIEM25 Manifesto implies through our subordination to the EU) or not, it is imperative that we create a Popular Front in each country which will include all the victims of globalization among the popular strata, regardless of their current political affiliations.
In Europe, in particular, where the popular strata are facing economic disaster, what is needed urgently is not an "antifascist" Front within the EU, as proposed by the ‘parliamentary juntas’ in power and the Euro-elites, also supported by the globalist “Left” (such as Diem25, Plan B in Europe, Die Linke, the Socialist Workers’ Party in the UK, SYRIZA in Greece and so on), which would, in fact, unite aggressors and victims. An ‘antifascist’ front would simply disorient the masses and make them incapable of facing the real fascism being imposed on them by the political and economic elites, which constitute the transnational and local elites. Instead, what is needed is a Popular Front that could attract the vast majority of the people who would fight for immediate unilateral withdrawal from the EU – which is managed by the European part of the transnational elite – as well as for economic self-reliance, thus breaking with globalization.
To my mind, it is only the creation of broad anti-EU Popular Fronts that could effect each country’s exit from the EU, with the aim of achieving economic self-reliance. Re-development based on self-reliance is the only way in which peoples breaking away from globalization and its institutions (like the EU) could rebuild their productive structures which have been dismantled by globalization. This could also, objectively lay the ground for future systemic change, decided upon democratically by the peoples themselves. To expect that the globalization process will itself create the objective and subjective conditions for a socialist transformation, as some ‘Paleolithic Marxists’ believe, or alternatively, that the creation of self-managed factories within the present globalized system will lead to a self-managed economy, as a variety of life-style “anarchists” suggest, is, in effect, to connive at the completion of the globalization process, as planned by the elites. Even worse, to expect that within the NWO institutions, like the EU, a ‘good’ EU and consequently a ‘good’ capitalist globalization will emerge at the end, as DIEM25, SYRIZA, Podemos and the like suggest, amounts to the pure disorientation of peoples which allows the plan for global governance to be fully implemented.
In other words, the fundamental aim of the social struggle today should be a complete break with the present NWO and the building of a new global democratic community, in which economic and national sovereignty have been restored, so that peoples could then fight for the ideal society, as they see it. The conditions of occupation we live under today mean that people resisting it have to make broad political alliances with everyone concerned who accepts the aims of a Popular Front for National and Social Liberation, particularly the basic aim of breaking with the NWO. Then, once the people of a particular country have broken with the NWO, they need to join with peoples from other countries who have already achieved their economic and national sovereignty and, together, form new economic unions of sovereign states to sort out, between them and on a bilateral or multilateral basis, the economic problems arising from trade and investment. Then and only then, the crucial issues of the form that a future society should take, and the strategy needed to achieve it, could be raised.
Therefore, the vital issue today, in the fight for the creation of a new democratic world order, is how we create this alternative pole of sovereign self-reliant nations, in full knowledge that the TE will use any kind of economic or physical violence at its disposal to abort any such effort, with all the huge means available to it. To my mind, under conditions of effective occupation, as many describe the present situation, this is impossible today without the creation of a Popular Front for National and Social Liberation (FNSL) in each country, allowing peoples to achieve their economic and national sovereignty as a precondition for social liberation.
The social subject of a mass popular front pursuing the aims I described above would be all the victims of neoliberal globalization: the unemployed and the partially employed, wage-earners on the very edge of survival (zero-hour contracts, occasional workers etc.), children without education who are ‘punished’ for being ‘unlucky’ enough to be born to non-“privileged” parents, as well as all those at the subsistence level (pensioners, the sick who lack medical insurance  amounting to one third of the population today  and others).
As far as the political subject is concerned, there are two possible options concerning the required Front for National and Social Liberation (FNSL): a front ‘from below’ or a front ‘from above’. The preferred option is of course the former, but in case this becomes unfeasible because the level of political consciousness of the victims of globalization and their will to fight is inadequate for this huge task, then the only other possibility is for existing political forces to take over the task of achieving sovereignty and self-reliance. A FNSL ‘from below’ could be organized from among local assemblies, committees, groups and initiatives consisting of the victims of globalization (namely, the vast majority of the world’s population) who ought to join as ordinary citizens, irrespective of party affiliations and ideologies or religious and other differences, as long as they share the ultimate aim of national and economic sovereignty. The intermediate target should be the exit from the international institutions of the NWO like the EU, so that the victims of globalization could escape the present process of economic catastrophe.
Then, once the people of a particular country have broken with this criminal “Order”, they should join with peoples from other countries, also fighting for the same aims, to form new political and economic unions of sovereign Nations and the corresponding democratically-organized international institutions together, within a new international community of self-reliant nations based on the principle of mutual aid rather than competitiveness  the guiding principle behind the present criminal NWO. As long as the member countries share complementary production structures, the possibility of an involuntary transfer of economic surplus from some countries (usually the weaker ones, as is the case in the EU) to other countries in the Union can be ruled out. Therefore, a collective kind of self-reliance could be achieved within the economic area covered by such a union, which should be based on the sovereignty of each participating country.
In other words, a FNSL would function as a catalyst for fundamental political and economic change, which is the only kind of change that could get us out of the current mire, while also revealing the attempted deception by the globalist “Left”, according to which we could somehow emerge from this catastrophe even without leaving the EU as DIEM 25 deceptively preaches.


[1] Pepe Escobar, “It takes a Greek to save Europa”, RT (11/2/2016).
[2] It should be noted that the ‘Manifesto’s’ options were also approved, albeit indirectly, by George Soros, one of Varoufakis’s strongest supporters, who stressed at the same time that “Putin’s aim is to foster the EU’s disintegration, and the best way to do so is to flood Europe with Syrian refugees.” (G. Soros, “Putin is a bigger threat to Europe’s existence than Isis”, The Guardian(11/2/2016).
[3] Y. Varoufakis, A Manifesto for democratising Europe (February 2016).
[4] See the official site of the European Round Table of Industrialists. See also the film by Friedrich Moser & Matthieu Lietaert, The Brus$€ls Business : Who Runs the European Union? (2012)
[5] Takis Fotopoulos, Τhe Transnational Elite and the NWO as “conspiracies” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 10, Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2014)
[6] Y. Varoufakis, A Manifesto for democratising Europe, op. cit.
[7] Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy (London/NY: Cassell/Continuum,1997), chs 5- 6.
[8] See unofficial transcript of DIEM25 speeches athttps://pad.riseup.net/p/DiEM25_Transcript
[9] See Takis Fotopoulos, Towards An Inclusive Democracy, op. cit.
[10] See Takis Fotopoulos, The New World Order in Action: War and economic violence, from the Middle East through Greece to Ukraine (under publication by Progressive Press), Parts I & III.
[11] See Takis Fotopoulos, The New World Order in Action, op. cit. ch. 6.
[12] Paul Krugman, “The austerity delusion”, The Guardian (29/4/2015).
[13] Anthony H. Birch, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 58.
[14] Bhikhu Parekh, “The Cultural Particularity of Liberal Democracy”, Political StudiesVolume 40, Issue Supplement s1, pages 160–175 (August 1992).
[15] According to Aristotle, “...I say that the appointment by lot is commonly held to be characteristic of democracy, whereas the process of election for that purpose is looked upon as oligarchic”; Aristotle, Politics, Book IV, 1294b, John Warrington, ed. (London: Heron Books)
[16] Anthony Birch, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Democracy, op. cit.p. 50.
[17] John Dunn, “Conclusion” in Democracy, the Unfinished Journey, 508 BC to AD 1993, pp. 247-48.
[18]  Varoufakis, A Manifesto for democratising Europe, op. cit.
[19] ibid.
[20] Takis Fotopoulos, “The real causes of the catastrophic crisis in Greece and the 'Left',” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, Vol. 9, Nos. 1/2 (Winter-Summer 2013)
[21] Editorial, “The People’s Revolt”, The Times (11/10/2014).
[22] “Globalization is barbarous, multinationals rule world” – Marine Le Pen, RT (10/1/2015).
[23] Adam Thomson, “France’s far-right National Front seeks voters from the left”, Financial Times (4/1/2015).
[24] ibid.
[25] Anne-Sylvaine Chassany and Roula Khalaf, “Marine Le Pen lays out radical vision to govern France”, Financial Times (5/3/2015).
[26] G. Soros, Putin is a bigger threat to Europe’s existence than Isis”, The Guardian (11/2/2016).
[27] Francis Elliott et. al., “Working class prefers Ukip to Labour”, The Times(25/11/2014).
[28] Takis Fotopoulos, “Globalisation, the reformist Left and the Anti-Globalisation ‘Movement’,” Democracy & Nature, Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 2001)
[29] See unofficial transcript of DIEM25 speeches athttps://pad.riseup.net/p/DiEM25_Transcript. See also the video itself athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFNJYpwv39s
[30] See the Open letter on the future of Ukraine”, signed by scores of Zizek-type globalization intellectuals, politicians et al, which declares their admiration for the Ukrainian ‘revolutionaries’: “They defended their democracy and their future 10 years ago, during the Orange Revolution, and they are standing up for those values again today “, euobserver (27/1/2014).


[31] This section is based on Part VI of the forthcoming book The New World Order in Action: War and economic violence, from the Middle East through Greece to Ukraine, op. cit.