Marx and his Modern Reincarnation Continue to be Hotbed of Gross Errata

By Con George-Kotzabasis

The following is a very brief reply to professor of economics Kostas Lapavitsas, and former member of Parliament with the Party of Syriza, to his thesis, that Greece can achieve its national sovereignty only by going back to its own currency, i.e., the drachma, delivered at the Ithacan House, Melbourne, on April 15, 2016. The three first paragraphs were omitted from my response as I assumed regrettably wrongly, that the time allotted to the questioners at the meeting would be too short and hence I did not include them.

 

Professor Lapavitsas, allow me to make a short comment before I come to my question, as at the start I want to point out what I believe to be the roots of your erroneous proposition.  

Dialectical materialism even in its modern reincarnation of neo-Marxism, which you espouse, is a hotbed of gross errata, not to say terata (monsters), and hence a fallacious doctrine.

Yet the ghost in the machine of Marxism, despite its irreparable breakdown, continues to churn-out apparitional panaceas for the ills of global capitalism. One such quack panacea is your own proposition.

My question is: Show us one country in the world hit by absolute poverty, which, your implied return to the drachma entails, that by adopting your proposal has achieved national sovereignty and kept it; If you cannot show us such a country, then your proposal is a mirage, a will-o’-the-wisp, an occult fancy.

But what is more worrisome is that you are asking the Greek people, after the botched Tsipras-Varoufakis experiment, to be also the guineapigs to your own theoretical experiment which has hardly better odds of success than the Varoufakian one.

National sovereignty is the result of prosperity not of poverty.

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Open Letter to Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis

By Con George-Kotzabasis October 14, 2015-

The Tsipras Government’s performance since its ascension to power on January 25 can be described by its three basic characteristics, infantilism, naiveté, and insouciant irresponsibility, which, as its finance minister, you embodied to the highest degree. Don’t expect to be treated kindly, at least by me, for the most unkind cut you inflicted upon the Greek people. Within the short time of six months you managed to destroy the economy by closing the banks and bringing in capital controls, and nipping in the bud the positive results of the Samaras Government that slowly but decisively were pulling the country out of the crisis. For the first time after the long economic stagnancy and recession, growth was recorded to be 0.8% and expected to be 2.5%-2.9 of GDP for the years 2014 and 2015 respectively, according to the IMF; also, unemployment was prevented from rising to 35%, as was predicted by eminent analysts, and indeed, had fallen by 2%, from 26% to 24% by the end of 2014. And all these heartening results happened within two and a half years under the prime ministership of Antonis Samaras. But you, like a revengeful immortal Olympian god full of envy of these mortal achievements of the Samaras Government, destroyed them with ambrosial delight. Your ludicrously eccentric policies and your barren and inflexible arrogant stand in your negotiations with the European Union brought the country back into recession and you capped this with a bill to Greece of an extra 90 billion to be paid to its creditors, which would come from the pockets of future Greek taxpayers. This was your enviable success story in contrast to the real success story of Samaras.

And yet blind and callous before this stupendous calamity that you delivered upon Greece, you proudly and insensitive claim to be “sitting on top of the world.” (I would add in your first word “sitting,” an h, so to make it a better fit to your ravishing pleasure: It must have been a relishing sensation to you, almost an aphrodisiacal one, defecating on “top of the world”.) You should be instead sitting in a dock charged with high treason for the great hurt and harm you afflicted, with such insouciant irresponsibility, upon the ordinary people whom with unheard hypocrisy you claim to represent. And no wonder that your European confreres were not listening to the bullshit you were emitting in your negotiations with them on the Memorandum, and their justifiable rebuke of your crank economic policies delivered to them in the form of lectures, in an aura of omniscience.

You claim to be a “liberal Marxist.” But you seem to be oblivious of the dismal fact that “Marxism” with any epithet before it, is “a skull that will never smile again,” to quote the ex-Marxist Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski. You are not a denizen of the real world but a denizen of the phantasmagorical world of Marxism whose legacy left behind not the Eden of Marx’s polytropos, many-sided, man, fishing in the morning, playing the flute in the evening, and writing poetry at night, but the police state of the NKVD, Gulag Archipelagos and Killing Fields.

In a footnote of the history of the twentieth-first century you will be described as a crank economist, a cowardly chicken gamester–taking risks not with your own but with other peoples money– and intellectual highjacker, who filched the writings of Marx and Keynes for the purpose of making your hybrid mulish economic doctrine, on whose back, as finance minister, you carried Greece to perfidious treasonable economic and political destruction.

The Dismal and Ideologically Biased Appraisal of an Economist about Greece’s Glimmer of Economic Recovery

By Con George-Kotzabasis-May 22, 2013

The Marxistoid professor of economics Yannis Varoufakis (In his keynote speech in the Subversive Festival of Zagreb, Croatia, on 14^th May, 2013, he confessed himself to be an “Erratic Marxist”), whom Marx himself would have placed under the category “vulgar” for following the footsteps of the great man erratically and loosely, in a choleric and ideologically tendentious article on his website, argues, that the “The Greek Success Story” is “The latest Orwellian Turn of the Greek Crisis.” All the favorable indices by which the “international press and the money markets seem to concur,” to quote him, that the country is on the road to recovery, are to the professor a contrived fiction and “vile propaganda” by the Samaras government to deceive and fool investors and to inveigle them to make “cheap investments” in the country with the prospect of high profits.

According to Varoufakis’ argument, among the deceived and the fools are not only investors but also renowned credit rating agencies, such as Standard and Poors, and Finch, which have upgraded the Greek state’s credit worthiness and four Greek banks, a number of serious economic commentators who foresee the reigniting of the Greek economy the following year and a growth of 0,6% in 2014 –some indeed write about a “booming” economy in the near future—and a bevy of the best and brightest of the European Commission that praises Greece for its rapid and effective reforms that enhanced its competitiveness. And to top it all, the ‘trickster’ Samaras was even able to deceive the economically astute and hardheaded Chinese and lure them to make investments in the infrastructure of the country and in real estate.

Only Professor Varoufakis is disabused of this deception and remains realistic about the dire prospects of Greece in the midst of this fictional euphoria that was able to entice cerebrally reputable institutions and people to see in this ‘mirage’ a “Greek Success Story.” It is rare to see such arrogant omniscience, of a second rate economist and Marxistoid to boot, attempting to trump all other economists and institutions that on a factual basis prognosticate an economic recovery of Greece.