#yannis varoufakis

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #shitty technology adoption curve #unauthorized bread #automotive #arm-breakers #cars #big car #right to repair #rent-seeking #digital feudalism #neofeudalism #drm #wei #remote attestation #private access tokens #yannis varoufakis #web environment integrity #paternalism #war on general purpose computing #competitive compatibility #google #enshittification #interoperability #adversarial interoperability #comcom #the internet con #postcapitalism #ring zero #care #med-tech

[just-a-got-otaku]

tagged by @dreamyghostie thank you and sorry for the late answer

rules: list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you

Red white and royal blue - Casey McQuiston

Austerity - Yannis Varoufakis

The Jakarta Method - Vincent Bevins

The House of Night novels - P. C. Cast

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Safe House - James Hogerty

Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil - Johann Wolfang von Goethe

Macbeth - William Shakespeare

Die Physiker - Friedrich Dürrenmatt

Der Sandmann - E. T. A. Hoffmann

ill tag @shrooomp @chuuyaphobic @gay-disaster-warlock @transtribbles @splitt13 @reggimuffins @uraeuseraph @shizunstan

[dnvdk]

Shareholderfeudalism I've been thinking about the term technofeudalism - as described by Yannis Varoufakis - a lot lately, especially in regards to the media stronghold and the societal implications of very small number of platform news and media get funneled through. The image above is not directly related, but adjacent in ethics and morality. It was placed with an article in a local news site about shoplifting in supermarkets and a newly implemented 'two strikes and your out' rule after which the shoplifter can't shop at that supermarket in the entire region. At face value the issue seems clear;

Shoplifting is illegal and a crime and the supermarkets are making enormous losses through these criminal activities, therefore they have all the right to educate their consumers about the risks of illegal behavior.

There is however, an interesting counter narrative that is as true. In the last decade unemployment nearly vanished statistically but households struggle because the pay in relation to the inflation is out of control. Where the solution for the crisis of 2008 was found in austerity - an incredibly cynical process that cut government funding for basic necessities - this time around it is less visible. Let there be no mistake; we are currently experiencing a similar wave of austerity but the mechanics are more refined and purely financial. The form it takes however is one of optimism - employment is at a record high and governments are doing very well financially. The elephant in the room however is the costs that the covid measurements put on the financial system of the West. The costs were clearly enormous since both income dropped and costs went up. It was however never a topic conversation as it was a crisis that needed an intervention and 'the money printer went prrrr', as the meme goes. The costs of these decisions were obviously astronomical though and the main method of alleviating this burden - and more importantly, getting back control over government finances and spending - is by diluting the value of the currency even further. Kick the can down the road. Pray and delay. Whether it will burst or not is not clear but the fact that many politicians from western governments decided to leave office in the lasts few months could be an indication. And a good old global war is helpful in taking our collective mind of this issue too. Okay so back to the image with the Albert Heijn cardboard-cutout-panopticon. It is taken in a 'self scan area' where customer take on the role of employees. This has been my gut reaction to these things from day one; a dystopian area where, to the plings-and-bleeps that would have suited a Black Mirror episode, the consumer is loaded with the responsibility of an employee - making that employee redundant in the process. And the customer is happy because you remove multiple interactions from their life; no queueing, no talking, no handing over cash. Just wear you noise cancelling headphones and carry on. And then - groceries got expensive. Really expensive. Twice as expensive in a little over a year. We were told it was because of the conflict in Ukraine raw materials and energy became more expensive and everything cascaded from that. But that would or could have been the case in a normal economy. We are currently experiencing something closer to hyperinflation. And the consequences for the average family are dire. Getting your children fed, warm and clean used to be the bare minimum of what could be expected in a western country and now it is no longer a given. And since all of this is complex and opaque, the immigrant gets blamed for taking the houses and stealing the jobs and the far right gains more and more momentum. All in the name of capitalism and to not scare the shareholders. So here we are; people steal at a supermarket because they can no longer afford the groceries and they get the opportunity because the shareholders of that supermarket though cashiers were to expensive. And then that supermarket shows affiliation with one of the two institutions that have a violence monopoly to scare them straight.

#technofeudalism #capitalism #shareholders #ah

[antikorg]

Les témoins à charge au procès révèlent la machination de l'État contre les anarchistes ! par Yannis Youlountas

Les témoins à charge au procès révèlent la machination de l’État contre les anarchistes ! par Yannis Youlountas

  [merci à Pia Klemp  pour la traduction en anglais] Nous nous dirigeons vers un nouveau scandale politique en Grèce ! LES TÉMOINS DE L’ACCUSATION AU PROCÈS RÉVÈLENT LA MACHINATION DE L’ÉTAT CONTRE LES ANARCHISTES ! Ce qui vient de se passer à Athènes est énorme ! C’est un événement qu’il faut faire connaître à tous ceux qui n’ont pas encore compris ce qu’est l’État et comment il traite ses…

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#Grèce #Yannis Varoufakis

[reseau-actu]

Quatre ans après son élection, l'ancien gauchiste est devenu un politicien habile qui a réussi à sortir son pays du marasme, au prix de quelques spectaculaires volte-faces, et en abandonnant ses principes une fois qu'ils ne lui servent plus.

Alexis Tsipras arborait un large sourire le vendredi 25 janvier 2019 au Parlement grec. En reconnaissant le droit de s'appeler Macédoine du Nord à l'ancienne république yougoslave de Macédoine, les députés grecs ont résolu par une courte majorité de 153  voix sur 300 un épineux problème onomastique qui empêchait l'intégration de ce pays balkanique dans l'Otan et dans l'Union européenne, bloquée par le veto grec. Le premier ministre grec Alexis Tsipras a applaudi longuement le vote. Il a salué un «jour historique pour la Grèce, qui met fin à une situation qui constituait un fardeau pour notre politique étrangère».

» LIRE AUSSI - Huit ans après son sauvetage, la Grèce libérée de sa tutelle financière

En même temps qu'une victoire diplomatique et politique, Tsipras savourait aussi un succès personnel, alors qu'il est menacé de perdre les prochaines élections législatives. Un succès à son image: celui d'un prestidigitateur, séduisant et un peu roublard qui parvient toujours à retomber sur ses pieds. Les Grecs l'ont surnommé le roi de la kolotumba, la cabriole.

La plus grande kolotumba d'Alexis Tsipras a été sa propre transformation de tribun populiste d'extrême gauche en un homme d'État pragmatique. Son élection en 2015 avait été un geste de défi de la Grèce en pleine banqueroute à ses créanciers européens, et en premier lieu à la chancelière allemande, Angela Merkel. Quatre ans plus tard, le premier ministre grec est devenu un interlocuteur respecté, habitué des sommets internationaux et reçu avec des égards dans les capitales étrangères. Son récent succès sur le dossier macédonien vient de le consacrer comme un négociateur habile. Ce portrait est presque l'exact opposé du personnage qu'il incarnait lors de ses débuts en politique.

Le jeune chef de Syriza incarne la résistance aux diktats des créanciers étrangers. Son slogan préféré, dans son anglais approximatif, est «go back Madame Merkel!» 

Comme beaucoup de révolutionnaires, Alexis Tsipras est né dans une famille de la bourgeoisie aisée, quelques jours après la fin du régime des colonels en 1974. Par réaction contre son milieu ou bien par effet de mode, Tsipras milite très jeune à l'extrême gauche. Étudiant à l'École polytechnique d'Athènes, l'un des bastions de l'agitation gauchiste, il rejoint les Jeunesses communistes, puis le parti Synaspismos. Son chef, Alekos Alavanos, est un marxiste orthodoxe à l'ancienne. Il prend sous son aile ce jeune homme prometteur.

Comme dans toute bonne tragédie grecque, le jeune homme prometteur ne tarde pas à trahir son mentor. Synaspismos est absorbé dans une nouvelle formation, Syriza (coalition de la gauche radicale), dont Tsipras devient le chef en 2008. Il a 33 ans et aime défier les conventions, au moins en apparence. Il ne porte jamais de cravate, affiche des portraits de Fidel Castro et de Che Guevara dans son bureau et refuse de se marier à l'église. Il appelle son premier fils Orphée-Ernesto en hommage au révolutionnaire argentin.

La carrière de Tsipras décolle alors que la Grèce plonge. À partir de 2009, la crise financière entraîne la quasi-banqueroute de la Grèce, dont on découvre que les comptes publics ont été sciemment maquillés.

Alors que le pays s'enfonce dans le marasme, Tsipras rejoint les Indignés, qui manifestent sur la place Syntagma, au centre d'Athènes, contre l'austérité. C'est là qu'il rencontre en 2011 un jeune orateur charismatique en blouson de cuir, Yanis Varoufakis. Économiste brillant, auréolé d'une carrière universitaire dans de prestigieuses universités étrangères, parfaitement anglophone, Varoufakis devient le conseiller économique de Tsipras. Il lui conseille de changer son programme et de ne pas réclamer l'abandon de l'euro, monnaie à laquelle les Grecs sont attachés. Tsipras écoute ces conseils et modifie son discours. L'année suivante, en 2012, Syriza remporte 27 % aux élections législatives et devient le premier parti d'opposition.

La résistance aux diktats

À la récession vient s'ajouter l'humiliation. La Grèce est mise sous tutelle internationale. Ses ministères sont visités par des représentants de la Troïka, formée par les trois créanciers de la Grèce, le Fonds monétaire international, la Banque centrale européenne et la Commission européenne, chargés de vérifier les comptes. Le jeune chef de Syriza incarne la résistance aux diktats des créanciers étrangers. Son slogan préféré, dans son anglais approximatif, est «go back Madame Merkel!». Cette attitude le rend vite très populaire dans un pays dont l'une des fêtes nationales est le «Jour du non», date anniversaire du refus par la Grèce de l'ultimatum de Mussolini en 1940.

Alors que les gouvernements chutent les uns après les autres en tentant d'appliquer les mesures d'austérité que ses créanciers imposent à la Grèce, Tsipras s'impose peu à peu comme le dernier recours. Le reste de la classe politique grecque est discrédité.

Le 25 janvier 2015, Syriza arrive en tête aux élections législatives anticipées, manquant de deux sièges la majorité au Parlement. La coalition d'extrême gauche est devenue le premier parti grec. Alexis Tsipras devient premier ministre. Il prend ses fonctions en refusant de prêter serment sur la Bible comme c'est l'usage. Son élection fait l'effet d'un coup de tonnerre. La Grèce vient de se doter du gouvernement le plus radical qui soit. Dans les capitales européennes, on craint déjà de voir la Grèce se déclarer en défaut de paiement ou quitter l'Union européenne. À Athènes, les foules chantent Bella Ciaoet saluent ce nouveau premier ministre qui va enfin dire non à la BCE, déchirer les mémorandums européens et supprimer le Enfia, l'impôt immobilier détesté par les Grecs.

Tsipras nomme Varoufakis ministre des Finances et le charge des négociations avec l'Union européenne. Varoufakis choisit la confrontation. Syriza n'est pas contre des réformes, mais exige que le gouvernement grec soit traité comme tel, et non pas comme un élève rebelle soumis à une punition. Varoufakis demande aussi que la dette grecque soit restructurée. Quelques mois plus tard, en juin 2015, c'est la rupture. Les Grecs refusent les conditions draconiennes que veut leur imposer l'Europe, et le Grexit devient une hypothèse de plus en plus probable, ou au moins une sortie de la zone euro. À la fin du mois, Tsipras annonce la fermeture des banques grecques, le contrôle des changes et la tenue d'un référendum sur les mesures proposées par l'Europe à la Grèce. Le premier ministre fait campagne sur le non aux mesures des créanciers, tout en soutenant le maintien dans l'euro et la reprise des négociations avec l'Union européenne.

«Il dit oui à tout. Aucun autre gouvernement n'aurait pu faire passer toutes ces mesures, il serait tombé»

Christina Koraï, une analyste politique

Le non l'emporte à 67 % des voix. Les électeurs ont rejeté le plan d'austérité européen. C'est une victoire pour Alexis Tsipras. Et aussi l'occasion de l'une des plus invraisemblables kolotumba: aussitôt le référendum remporté, il fait presque immédiatement volte-face en reprenant les négociations. À la surprise générale, Tsipras accepte cette fois le 3e memoranda des Européens qui impose une cure de rigueur à l'économie grecque. Par une contorsion dont il a le secret, le premier ministre grec explique qu'il est contre l'esprit du texte, mais qu'il le soutient pour éviter à la Grèce de sortir de l'euro. Il présente enfin sa démission. Des élections anticipées ont lieu.

«Il dit oui à tout. Aucun autre gouvernement n'aurait pu faire passer toutes ces mesures, il serait tombé», dit Christina Koraï, une analyste politique. Contre toute attente, Tsipras gagne son pari. Il remporte les élections en septembre 2015 et est reconduit à son poste.

Un bilan en demi-teinte

Alexis Tsipras s'est transformé. L'ancien gauchiste a opéré son tournant libéral. L'homme du non fait à présent tout pour plaire aux Européens. Il multiplie les déplacements à l'étranger, reçoit Obama, s'entretient régulièrement avec Hollande.

Le nouveau Tsipras a pris de court tous ses adversaires. La gauche grecque conteste la politique de rigueur, et la frange la plus radicale de Syriza crie à la trahison, mais sa présence au gouvernement lui enlève une grande partie de sa crédibilité. La droite s'est quant à elle vue privée de son programme de libéralisation économique. Surtout, Syriza occupe presque tout le champ politique. Les députés des formations rivales rejoignent ses rangs en masse. Il n'y a plus que l'extrême droite d'Aube doréepour s'opposer à lui. Ses adversaires lui reprochent son absence totale de principes, sa façon de tout promettre à tout le monde, de ne jamais dire non à personne et de ne jamais tenir parole. «C'est un cas d'école», dit Nikolakopoulos, expert politique.

Mais sa recette fonctionne. Après huit ans de récession, l'économie grecque finit par se redresser. Le chômage repasse en dessous des 20 % et les exportations reprennent. Ce bilan reste en demi-teinte. «56 % des nouvelles embauches sont instables et 1 sur 3 jeunes ne touche que 380 euros alors que la dette publique ne cesse d'augmenter», tempère Christina Koraï.

Tsipras évite soigneusement les obstacles. Quand il veut donner des gages à la frange progressiste de son électorat en prenant des mesures pour séparer l'Église et l'État, le clergé orthodoxe, menacé de perdre son statut de fonctionnaire, réagit. L'Église négocie avec Tsipras. La réforme est ajournée.

On brocarde ses habitudes bourgeoises. Les tabloïds font les gorges chaudes de sa liaison supposée avec une jeune élue de Syriza, qu'il propulse en tête de liste à Thessalonique. Son numéro d'équilibrisme finit par lasser l'opinion.

Les sondages annoncent sa réélection comme difficile. Alexis Tsipras n'est pourtant pas encore vaincu. Sans adversaires de son calibre, doté d'un sens politique redoutable, il peut se targuer d'avoir été le seul chef de gouvernement à avoir duré toute une législature depuis le rétablissement de la démocratie en Grèce en 1974. Son récent succès sur le dossier macédonien, réputé insoluble et qui a déjà provoqué la chute de plusieurs gouvernements, tombe à point nommé. Même si on l'accuse d'avoir négocié cet accord avec Skopje à la va-vite, seul le résultat compte. Alexis Tsipras rêve déjà prix au prix Nobel de la paix. Et pourquoi pas, à un deuxième mandat. «Il ne porte pas beaucoup de cravates mais depuis qu'il a fait sa kolotumba, il a ajouté des pochettes à ses costumes», dit Christina Koraï.

#grèce #alexis tsipras #yannis varoufakis #international #actualité internationale

[damefriday-blog]

The Vasanizomai Holidays:  England

From April 2018 to March 2019 – limited time offer only, pending UK exiting the EU

  - Follow former finance minister Yannis Varoufakis on a tour across London. Depending on his schedule, whether he’s writing another book or forming another party, Yannis should be able to act as your guide and interpreter, should you require.

 - Witness the benefits of UK modest living. For the price of just £800, millennials can secure a luxury shed in London. Watch them try to justify spending their entire salary on a room that has the dimensions of a shoebox.

 - Gain unique insight into the British food culture. Visit cafes and talk to ordinary people about their choice of breakfast. What led them to this unfortunate position? Who hurt them?

 - Experience a traditional British day by the sea side. Socks and sandals available upon request for a nominal fee. Who knew the ocean could be so brown?

 - Drink some of the last bottles of imported wine. Will the UK survive without foreign, quality booze? Fuck no!

 - Visit one of the top twenty British universities of your choosing. Discuss the benefits of higher education in the UK with students. Is being in debt for the better part of their adult life worth it?

- After being horribly poisoned by what passes for British cuisine, spend a day as a patient at the Royal London Hospital. Experience one of the best healthcare systems in the world before all the highly qualified foreign medical staff migrate to another country and the whole thing collapses in on itself.

 * For just 50p a day you too can help a Brit get a proper meal and some decent coffee. Please, click button below. Thank you.

#the guardian #holiday #greek #reaction #article #financial crisis #recession #austerity #yannis varoufakis #english heritage #brexit #leaving the eu

[unpensadoranonimo]

Europa tiembla ante la crisis italiana

La decisión del presidente de la república italiana de rechazar el nombramiento de Paolo Savona como ministro de economía de la coalición entre la Liga Norte y el Movimiento Cinco Estrellas, la consiguiente renuncia del nuevo primer ministro Giuseppe Conte y, finalmente, el nombramiento de un gobierno técnico encabezado por Carlo Cottarelli, exdirigente del FMI, han precipitado a Italia en una crisis política cuya gravedad sólo puede compararse a la que en 1992 provocó el formidable escándalo de corrupción conocido como “Tangentopoli”.

Tanto la Liga como el M5S, por boca de sus principales líderes, Matteo Salvini y Luigi Di Maio, han pedido que se convoquen lo más pronto posible nuevas elecciones, al tiempo que han atacado duramente al presidente de la República, Sergio Mattarella, por “haber contravenido la voluntad de los italianos expresadas en las urnas”. “Los italianos tienen que decidir y yo nunca me he ocupado de los ministros franceses y alemanes” –ha dicho Salvini-, dejando entender, según Le Monde, que varias potencias europeas habrían presionado a Mattarella para que impidiera el nacimiento del nuevo gobierno. “Italia es ahora un país con soberanía limitada”, ha rematado Salvini.

“No podemos limitarnos a mirar lo que pasa”, ha escrito por su parte Di Maio en Facebook dirigiéndose al país. “Tenemos que reaccionar enseguida y con firmeza. Hoy colgaré una bandera italiana de mi ventana y os pido que hagáis lo mismo y os invito a todos a venir a Roma el 2 de junio para una gran manifestación. La del domingo ha sido la noche más oscura de la democracia”.

Alivio e inquietud en Europa

La prensa alemana respira tras el rechazo del nombramiento de Paolo Savona. El diario Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung había calificado el viernes a ese economista de 81 y euroescéptico declarado de “ enemigo de Alemania”. Y las ediciones de la prensa alemana del domingo concentraban todas sus esperanzas en el presidente de la República, Sergio Mattarella. “El jefe de Estado italiano ha hecho bien. ¡Ánimo Mattarella!”, titula hoy el principal diario económico germano, el Handelsblatt.

Pero no todos se muestran optimistas. El Frankfurter Allgemeine dice: “Tras el fracaso de la formación del gobierno en Italia, el euro recupera valor. Pero esa recuperación tiene los pies vacilantes”. El Suddeustche Zeitung, recordando que Mattarella está siendo acusado por algunos de “alta traición”, escribe: “el país afronta tiempos dramáticos. Un conflicto entre instituciones como el actual no se había producido en toda la historia de la república”. Y Die Welt opina que en unas nuevas elecciones el gran vencedor sería la Liga Norte. Una opinión que comparte el exministro de economía griego Yannis Varoufakis: “La formación de un gobierno técnico bajo la férula de un antiguo apparatchik del FMI es un regalo fantástico para Matteo Salvini”, dice el ex-ministro griego de economía.

Las consecuencias económicas posibles… también en España

Al igual que otros muchos diarios europeos, el Financial Times abre con el asunto y dice: “los títulos de deuda italianos han alcanzado niveles que no se conocían desde los años de la crisis económica (la prima de risego está en 230 puntos) y la bolsa ha perdido todo lo que había ganado desde el comienzo de 2018. Ahora se abre un periodo de confrontación entre los pupulistas y el establishment italiano a la espera de unas elecciones en otoño. Esa perspectiva podría añadir una prima de incertidumbre a los títulos italianos. Muchos inversores temen que una crisis constitucional en Italia o el replanteamiento de las dudas sobre el futuro de la eurozona amenacen la estabilidad económica”.

El sábado, el Financial Times sumaba los problemas políticos españoles a los que se están produciendo en Italia: “Aunque la decisión del líder socialista Pedro Sánchez de presentar una moción de confianza han provocado una caída del 2,7 % de la bolsa y los títulos del Estado cayeran como no lo habían hecho desde septiembre, Italia sigue siendo el mayor foco de atención del mundo político y de los mercados. España se encuentra en una situación fiscal mucho menos mala que Italia. Pero su situación de inestabilidad política, que puede provocar nuevas elecciones, llega en un mal momento, cuando los inversores están dando la espalda a la eurozona. “Es fácil ver qué vulnerable pueden ser los países muy endeudados si se erosiona la confianza de los inversores”, dice Mark Dowding, del grupo de inversiones Blue Bay Asset Management”.

Fuente: Carlos Elordi

#opinion #internacional #italia

[gaiaitaliacom]

De Magistris è uno e bino. E scomodo. E inviso a Spirlì. Potrebbe anche diventare Governatore

De Magistris è uno e bino. E scomodo. E inviso a Spirlì. Potrebbe anche diventare Governatore

di Daniele Santi #Politica Dopo aver provato a creare un sodalizio politico con Yannis Varoufakis e Ada Colau senza risultati, dopo aver tentato di costruirsi un futuro politico guardando un po’ al M5S e un po’ all’area PD di Ruotolo, oggi Luigi De Magistris non avendo trovato alternative per proseguire il suo cammino torna in Calabria e si appresta a chiudere il suo rapporto con Napoli. Come la…

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[porcileorg]

A conversation about Kunstverein München’s group show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class’ (2020-09-12 – 2020-11-01)

Conversants: The Bensplainer, Magda Wisniowska, and Victor Sternweiler [talking on Skype, in the evening of Nov 11, 2020.]

Victor: We should start our conversation about Kunstverein München’s show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class,’ [online through 2020-11-22] curated by Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay, while making clear that we were not able to attend the parallel program, consisting of tours, lectures, performances, and video screenings, which were partially screened online, and an extensive reader was published too. This will simply be a conversation about the actual show. One could claim that such a review can’t do justice to the whole project, but I claim that nobody was able to attend everything, except for the makers, so one can only have a fragmented take on it, and therefore it is legitimate to, mainly or solely, talk about the work installed in the space. 

Exhibition consisted work by Angharad Williams, Annette Wehrmann, Gili Tal, Guillaume Maraud, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Lise Soskolne, Matt Hilvers, Stephen Willats.

A film screening series selected by Nadja Abt, showing work by Adrian Paci, Agnès Varda, Ayo Akingbade, Barbara Kopple, Berwick St Collective, Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant, Max Göran.

A single event screening with films selected by Simon Lässig.

Accompanying program consisting of a book presentation (Düşler Ülkesi) by Cana Bilir-Meier (in conversation with Gürsoy Doğtaş), lectures by NewFutures, Ramaya Tegegne, Tirdad Zolghadr and a publication presentation (Phasenweise nicht produktiv) from a collaboration by Carolin Meunier and Maximiliane Baumgartner.

The reader containing contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, Steven Warwick.

Exhibition documentation: https://artviewer.org/not-working-artistic-production-and-matters-of-class/

Magda: To help, I was rereading today the booklet accompanying the exhibition, although I don’t see how the text is really going to address what we see in the actual Kunstverein space. For example, I quote, “The works on view are characterized by a consciousness of how background, socialization, education, and artistic practice are inevitably entangled. They hence allow for a consideration of these categories in relation to the actual lived realities of their producers.” Does it mean that the artists somehow reflect their own social background? Autobiographically on their own lived reality? Well, by large, they don’t. We don’t know what social background these artists are coming from.

Victor: How would you know anyhow?

Magda: Instead, the coherency of the exhibition relies on going through all the positions which were outlined in the booklet’s introduction. So, Stephen Willats investigates the historical aspect of class, Annette Wehrmann performs the interrogation of the economic model, Josef Kramhöller’s is a more personal approach to consumerism, Gili Tal tackles gentrification and cosmopolitanism, and Angharad Williams addresses the performative and fashion , and so on. And at least two of the artists are no longer alive.

Victor: In the time of Covid, where you try to make ends meet, how can you say no? What I’m trying to say is that the precariousness of their class is testified also by artists not being able to nowadays refuse to participate in an exhibition in which they potentially don’t think they fit in. They do it, plain and simple.

The Bensplainer: I don’t think it is due to Covid. It’s a general trend. If you're invited by the artistic director of the Venice Biennale, whatever their exhibition idea is, you participate, as an artist. It’s not anymore the time when an Alighiero Boetti could angrily refuse an invitation by Harald Szeemann.

Magda: Is that really the central problem of this exhibition? There are a lot of problematic issues, and I am now again looking at the text, especially at the end, where it states that “today the question of class is not addressed anymore.” That is completely untrue. Much of postmodernism consisted precisely of the critical inquiry into questions of class. I don’t know about you, Bensplainer, but in my time in London we had to read a lot of Bourdieu, especially his idea concerning cultural capital.

The Bensplainer: Jameson was my lighthouse at that time!

Magda: It was a big thing! You can’t say really the topic had been ignored since then.

The Bensplainer: Especially after the last Documenta in 2017. 

Magda: I acknowledge that the question of class is no longer about a white male perspective, defined by simple economics. But really? What does this exhibition add to this conversation? 

The Bensplainer: I think that the main problem here is when you set up a thematic exhibition. If you, as a curator, have some aprioristic ideas about the specific interpretations on cultural work, then you tend to apply them to your own exhibition making. Although, you tend to lose contact with the works themselves. You tend to look more at the anecdotal parts of the work and at its processes. Let’s be honest, there are no great works in the exhibition, the ones being able to question your own vision of forms and of the world in which these forms happen.

Magda: I think the older works displayed here, as Stephen Willats’ ones, from the 1980s, present some problems: they are, in fact, historical, and at that time had a certain currency, whereas they seem today …

The Bensplainer: … nostalgic.

Magda: And dry as well: this kind of class idea, of people living in a housing block – like he documented and interviewed – it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. The other thing is that it seems so British, so entwined in that specific culture. We know this Monty Python sketch, right? This kind of satire, for example, wouldn’t fit German society at that time, I think.

Magda: The other thing I was thinking of, while walking through the exhibition, was Pulp’s ‘Common People.’ (1995) Did anyone think of that? The song is about a girl from the upper classes, who wants to behave as being from the lower. But she never achieves that, because she always has her rich daddy in the background. I think that a potential problem this exhibition faces is of glamorizing this kind of a working-class cliché.

Victor: That song is especially ironic, as it was brought to my attention by a friend that Danae Stratou, the artist, industrialist heir and wife of Yannis Varoufakis, is the subject of that song. 

Magda: Yes, that’s why I mention it. 

Victor: I had a chat with The Bensplainer at some point and we had concerns about the installing too. It seemed, we agreed, like an art fair show display. The question is: how do you display all these works like a survey of an idea?

Magda: It is about all the artistic positions that the text referred to. As I said before.

The Bensplainer: If you see such an exhibition, you might consider how it fits a piece of writing, it being a master or a PhD thesis. On the other hand, it really lacks the viewer’s possibility to freely interact with the works. In other terms: how could you translate an idea for an exhibition, if the exhibition itself follows a logocentric and rational process? There is no surprise, indeed: I wanna see something, I don’t wanna learn something. 

Victor: This is a kind of philosophy made clear by the exhibition makers: what can art do and how it can utilize itself, in order to convey politics?

The Bensplainer: Do you mean how art can be utilitarian?

Victor: Let’s say you have a curatorial agenda, or an hypothesis: art-making as a precarious condition. And then you, as an exhibition maker, attempt to visualize that. In this sense, these works witness this very aspect, like art illustrating an intellectual point of view.

Magda: Otherwise said, either it is the work that is convincing, or the hypothesis. Right now, it doesn’t seem to be either. About the works I don’t wanna say much, but the text, its arguments can be easily dismantled. In many places, it is simply not coherent. For example, why do you state in the exhibition text that the coronavirus pandemic is what makes visible the rise of social inequalities the exhibition addresses, and then you show works from the 1980s? It makes no sense.

The Bensplainer: Works from the 1980s which recall works from the 1960s.

Magda: Exactly! If you were really consistent with your method, you would research the topic, then find out who’s working with it now. Not the artists who kind of work with the idea… just a little bit, so that they can fit your curatorial idea.

Victor: On the behalf of the curators: why should you do a show like that? What are their motivations?

Magda: Of course, you can do a show addressing the notion of class. There’s nothing wrong about that. Even if it were an illustration of ideas, it could work. But you need a good thesis first, while here the positions that are supposed to illustrate it, are weak. Who liked Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky’s installations?

Victor: As a person who attended some performances by Ziegler and Janitzky previous to the KM show, but not to the last one actually at KM, I would say I see their sculptures as stage props. These performances enchanted or activated their sculptures. So, I’m quite neutral about their works in the show, but at the same time I’m neutral about all the works featured. It seems to me that the show has an agenda in representing all kinds of mediums. Photography, video … like a checklist.

The Bensplainer: Maybe old-fashioned?

Magda: It is a safe agenda. If you take Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism,’ he states that museums and related institutions are safe spaces where we can make criticism of capitalism, while capitalism itself allows it.

Victor: Yeah, Roland Barthes already said that. On my part, I am totally opposed to the idea of ‘making art’ as a profession, in the capitalist sense. When paying your rent depends on the money from selling your art, then soon you’ll be under pressure to produce, and that in return, I think, ultimately leads to overproduction and junk.

Magda: Then we ought to know more about the artists and how they position themselves to the capitalist model. 

The Bensplainer: I think we are derailing the conversation. I mean, after 1989, there is only one religion, which is capitalism, and you hardly can escape this fact (I agree with Giorgio Agamben on this). Insisting on this leftist nostalgia is counterproductive. Art is luxury. Some artists are fighting against this mindset, but we are still in such a system.

Magda: Indeed – and yet the exhibition promotes an anti-capitalist position. For example, The Coop Fund’s aim is to provide an alternative funding, so that is very clear. Guillaume Maraud is also doing a standard institutional critique by creating an alternative fund. 

The Bensplainer: At the same time, these practices are canonized. When KM showed Andrea Fraser in 1993, the questions she raised were novel and on the point. The visuals in this present show are canonized. Stephen Willats repeats a visual language of more established artists, as Hans Haacke for instance. 

Magda: Yes, maybe the only thing Willats adds is a British perspective on the problem.

The Bensplainer: Victor, you said on the occasion of our NS-Dokumentationszentrum conversation [link]: „Preaching to the converted.“ Basically, we find here the same pattern. So, you can argue with a lot of reasoning about a motivation for an exhibition – in this case an anti-capitalist agenda – but what I expect is to see works and practices which change the way I see. Sorry if I repeat myself, but seeing works which repeat, without a difference, canonized visual experiences from the past gives me such a kind of déjà vu effect. What is this exhibition about? What are the politics that motivated it? From the point of view of the exhibition making, it is in itself a sort of repetition. In the last Documenta, the assumptions were similar: a lot of nostalgic Marxism and related leftist theoretical positions, which are good, but at the end of the day, the works become an illustration sketched aprioristically by the curators and the artistic director. Here lays the critical point which we really have to address. Paradoxically, if the works are repeating themselves, aren’t also the politics of exhibition making repeating themselves? 

Magda: Yes and no. My question is: why are you repeating these positions? You can repeat a practice under the change of circumstances: the pandemic has changed the parameters. 

The Bensplainer: I agree: the pandemic has unveiled changes which were not so clear before that. 

Magda: So, does the repetition offered in this exhibition reflect that? Does our present context require repetition? How are the works from the 1980s and 1990s relevant now?

The Bensplainer: Let’s be clear: I don’t consider repetition with a negative value. I remember a wonderful group show at KW, Berlin, in 2007, titled ‘History Will Repeat Itself.’ Precisely, it was interesting because it focused on repetition as a visual device, that’s to say how artists and works dealt with the notion of repetition, be it of other works or of overarching experiences. I remember this great video by Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ (2001), directed by Mike Figgis, in which the artist reenacted the famous 1984 clash between workers and police in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, England, and interviewed some participants from both sides too. By the way, it was a ground breaking show, but if you now repeat because it is fashion, a canon, then repeating loses its critical charge. Moreover, works become simply an illustration of the curator’s idea. It seems to me so frustrating now, especially when Anton Vidokle already addressed the question in his seminal and controversial article ‘Art Without Artists?’ on e-flux already in 2010. [link]

Victor: Yeah, that’s what I find problematic with this show: in this time of existential precariousness, how can an artist be critical or be able to question the politics of an exhibition? You’re invited, you get attention and funds, you simply go along with it. The institutions are creating ideological precariousness by wagging with the money. Nonetheless, I see that an artist needs the money. I think it is an inherent issue of institutional exhibition making, but I can’t see an immediate way out of it. It is a trap. The people in the institutions are also paid to play their role, and if they refuse to, replacement will be found quickly.

The Bensplainer: I don’t think that it is the main point here.

Magda: I recognize that there are many artists that suffer contemporary financial precariousness, but there are equally many who do not. Let’s be honest, how many artists, or student artists, may claim that they are coming from working class families? I mean, many are playing the role, but really?

The Bensplainer: I have to check it again, but there is a statistic in Bavaria that states that families on the edge of or below existential and financial poverty who are able to send their kids to higher education are 6 or 7%. That’s a ridiculous percentage, especially because these underprivileged students or artists have then a structural difficulty in order to enter the so-called art system.

Magda: Mid- or upper-class people study art. They come from that comfortable background. At any given time, they may or may not have money, but they indeed have a safety net. 

Victor: People that I talked to were missing a critical view on the institution itself and how this show sits within its history and why they did the show there, since the Kunstverein was developed specifically to cultivate an image and space for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, by propagating aesthetic values from the upper class. It was the beginning of the ‘public sphere’ separate from the court, but also was the image of upward mobility and how its members today, generally upper middle class, use the space as a form of patronage and charity as an additive to their cultural capital. So, one might interpret this show as cynical, but I personally think that there is also the possibility of freeing yourself up from that tradition and subverting or bastardizing that project of that middle class of 200 years ago. However, I think that the show is too conventional and there is an opportunity missed here. 

The Bensplainer: Sorry if I always bring up my PhD topic about the Russian so-called Avant-Garde. If you analyze it socially, the Avant-Garde cloud was also animated by class and social warfare. Practitioners from the periphery came to the capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they had to fight with their contemporaries belonging to the urban mid- or upper-class world. For instance, you have Malevich who needs to rent a big apartment for him and his family, in order to sub-let and make a little profit from other people. But he also has to provide meals for them and he can paint only when he has some spare time. You still have today this romantic idea of the Avant-Garde, forgetting that it was also a very hard social situation.

Magda: But, the thing is that the economic or even its symbolic model, doesn’t seem to be really relevant. Class as it was in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s doesn’t exist anymore. What about class and technology? You can’t apply for jobs because you don’t have easy access to the Internet, because you don’t own a laptop or a smartphone. You can’t have a flat because you don’t get the notification on time. And flexibility changed the notion of work. There are a lot of structural changes in our societies, which the show’s accompanying text acknowledges clearly, but they are not examined in the work, or at least only in the orthodox leftist way. These positions are repeated nostalgically in the art. To me, the working class today is exemplified by DHL delivery workers.

The Bensplainer: I would add this. Today's working class might also be embodied by wannabe successful TikTok accounts! You may immediately perceive the fakeness in appropriating models from the supposed upper class in order to convey a different idea about yourself.

Magda: Fake it until you make it! TikTok responds to an already established model.

The Bensplainer: The novel level conveyed by TikTok is that it is not about hustling or conning anymore. Everybody knows everything is fake, so everybody accepts the coded rules.

Victor: That’s the classic definition of Žižek’s ‘ideology.’

Magda: Coming back to the show, I was surprised that urgent political issues were not questioned. I mean, the rise of populism is an issue, and it is class oriented. I don’t know much about Berlusconi and his years in power, but he did address the narrative of his politics to a certain class and set up a model for the recent years, didn’t he?

The Bensplainer: We Italians are not recognized in such a way anymore, but we’re still at the verge of the Avant-Garde! If history repeats itself as a farce, after Berlusconi everything is a farce. He had – and to some extent still has – an appeal to the working class, in the sense that he sold a narrative through which you can change your life only by willing it. At his first election run in 1994 he won in working class’ bastions, where traditionally the former Communist Party won with ease, efficiently selling his abstract ideas on liberty through his glittering television sets. So, already then, you might perceive that categories such as the Left and the Right were structurally changing. And this historical and epochal shift, so charged with ideological questions, is totally forgotten in this exhibition. 

Magda: Thus, I could have accepted as legitimate the exhibition’s assumptions, even if illustrational, if they would have addressed the ongoing complexity of the topic of populism, digitalization, 0-hours contracts, and so on, all related to an idea of the working class. Then it would have been fair enough!

The Bensplainer: I would add another topic to this. If you consider the state of satire, especially from the US, comedy is way ahead of visual art. It addresses those topics in a much more effective and creative way than visual art is actually doing. Only because they’re really reaching millions of people.

Magda: Yes, John Oliver, for instance.

The Bensplainer: I became a huge fan of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologues in the last two years, because he and his authors adapted his style of comedy shifting from weird Hollywood absurdities to overall US social and political issues. So, his and his authors’ craft reached a new level of satire, and the audience’s awareness. What can visual art do, as powerful as it might be, in comparison to mainstream satire? Let’s simply think about how Kimmel dealt with the topic Obamacare and how he related to – his personal history.

Magda: This is important, as access to healthcare in the US especially, is a class issue. But then, yeah, why don’t you simply invite a comedian to KM, then? Ok, you could never afford that, but who knows?

The Bensplainer: It would be so wonderful! But this idea should also be declined in a weirder approach. 

Magda: For sure, a comedian in an art space could have more freedom compared to the one he could have on national television. 

The Bensplainer: Victor, do you remember Olof Olsson’s performance at Lothringer 13’s cafe in Munich in 2017? 

Victor: Yes.

The Bensplainer I found it brilliant, mixing visual and comedy devices, and very generous, because it lasted so long! This kind of transdisciplinary performance says more about social, political and economic issues, than a conventional show, like this one at KM. If I had to make a single critical statement about this show at KM is that it doesn’t move our present cultural perception to a different plane, as satire does.

Magda: My impression is that a student went through their assigned reading list, without going to the library. Everything which was required was read, but no insight was then further researched. 

#flaschendrehen #magdawisniowska #thebensplainer #victorsternweiler #kunstvereinmünchen #kunstvereinmuenchen #munich #maurindietrich #gloriahasnay #art #class #stephenwillats #annettewehrmann #josefkramhöller #gilital #angharadwilliams #lauraziegler #stephanjanitzky #coopfund #markfisher #pulp #montypython #johnoliver #jimmykimmel #berlusconi #covid #coronavirus #culturalcapital #culturalwork #capitalism

[samoempalador]

#internancional progresista

[boggart23]

Former Greek Minister Varoufakis Exposes EU Failure On Coronavirus

Former Greek finance minister Yannis Varoufakis (picture: Getty)

As uncertainty continues over how best to deal with the coronavirus pandemic and the crisis deepens throughout Europe, economist and former Financial Minister in Greece’s short lived, Eurosceptic Syriza government Yanis Varoufakis delivered an incisive critique of how utterly wrongheaded the EU’s response to the spread of the…

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#brussels #coronavirus #crisis #economic #eu #euro #Eurozone #failure

[bbctojob]

候選人為歐盟委員會主席工作擔任主席

圖片版權 法新社

接替讓 – 克洛德·容克擔任歐盟委員會主席的候選人在整個歐盟的電視辯論中發生衝突。

這是其中的一部分 spitzenkandidat – 或“領導候選人” – 這個過程，歐洲議會中泛歐的志同道合的政黨團體提出了這一角色的競爭者。

每個申請人必須參加將於5月23日至26日舉行的歐洲選舉。

這項工作的工作人員超過30,000人，是歐盟領導人峰會的一個席位，並有權提出新的歐洲法律。

這個概念在2014年首次嘗試。它的目的是通過讓勝利者通過類似競選活動的方式使約會更加民主。

一個非常簡單的歐洲選舉指南

投票如何在歐洲選舉中發揮作用？

圖片版權 Getty Images / Candidates

圖片標題

Weber先生，Timmermans先生，Vestager女士，Keller女士，Cue先生和Zahradil先生

六名候選人在布魯塞爾登台：

曼弗雷德韋伯，歐洲人民黨

曼弗雷德韋伯從小就是歐盟有影響力的中右翼政黨集團的高級傳單。他經常強調他的巴伐利亞根源，因為他推動了他的歐洲10點計劃。

他是最接近比賽的領跑者，但他唯一能參加的是歐洲議會的EPP代表團。

他承諾任命一名專員來監督與非洲的新關係，以幫助控制向歐洲的移民。他說，與其他國家的未來貿易協議將包括禁止童工的條款。

但他不得不抵制他的中右翼同事投票反對氣候變化措施的指責。

弗蘭斯蒂默曼斯，歐洲社會黨的黨

他是歐洲委員會的多語種第一副總統。荷蘭人通過歐盟立法禁止使用塑料吸管，並就歐盟與土耳其的協議進行談判，以減少移民的流動。

他在辯論中的簽名提案是歐盟18％的最低公司稅率。

自由黨人Margrete Vestager

來自丹麥的Vestager女士目前負責監督歐盟委員會的競爭政策，在那裡她領導的調查結束了對谷歌和蘋果的巨額罰款。

但她承認委員會疏遠了選民。

“去年我們獲得了數字公民的權利。我們稱之為GDPR。我們怎能指望人們欣賞這一點？”

不同尋常的是，自由黨為歐盟的最高職位派出了六人名單，其中包括歐洲議會的英國退歐協調員Guy Verhofstadt。

Ska Keller，歐洲綠黨

這是Ska Keller的第二次 spitzenkandidat。雖然她是格林，但她很可能將移民的權利作為環境的困境來談論。

她要求未來的協議包含更好的人權保護。

荷蘭環保主義者Bas Eickhout也代表綠黨。

最左邊的代表是來自西班牙的前金屬工，他在比利時長大。

“歐盟統一面臨風險，因為在歐洲南部實施了前所未有的暴力緊縮政策，”他說。

他與前電視女演員兼斯洛文尼亞議會議員Violeta Tomic分享角色。

Jan Zahradil，歐洲保守派和改革派

歐洲保守黨和改革派選擇此捷克環境保護部來限制歐盟機構的權力並加強各成員國的作用。

他引用了他的祖國民意調查顯示，90％的公民希望���在歐盟，但70％的人不想加入單一貨幣歐元。

“有一個明顯的例子，人們喜歡歐盟，但不喜歡歐盟的所有產��，”他說。

那麼誰會贏？

其他各種政治部落的數據被認為具有潛力 spitzenkandidaten 但要么未能達到參加電視辯論的標準，要么從未完全接受這個想法。

包括意大利副總理Matteo Salvini，前希臘財政部長Yannis Varoufakis和Oriole Junckeras，目前因參加2018年加泰羅尼亞獨立公投而入獄。

但不能保證他們中的任何人最終都會成為歐盟委員會主席。

以前這份工作是由那些在選舉中獲得最多席位的人來完成的。

儘管戴維•卡梅倫和匈牙利總理維克托歐爾班反對，但這就是讓 – 克勞德容克五年前得到這份工作的方式。

您的設備不支持媒體播放

媒體標題如何選擇下屆歐盟委員會主席

這一次，歐盟領導人表示歐洲條約賦予他們提名角色的唯一權力，並且他們只有在他們做出選擇時才能對歐洲議會選舉的結果點頭。

成功的候選人必須獲得歐洲議會的多數席位。

簡介：歐盟的Jean-Claude Juncker

兩次經濟救助後，在歐盟的愛恨交織

此次任命更有可能成為各國之間權力交易的產物，以及歐盟其他即將出現的空缺中性別和地域平衡的必要性，其中包括歐洲中央銀行行長，歐洲理事會主席和歐盟外交政策負責人。

“這意味著我們可能最終會得到每個人的第二選擇，”一位歐盟官員解釋道。

圖片版權 蓋蒂圖片

圖片標題

巴尼爾先生和默克爾夫人都被傳言作為候選人 – 只是沒有選擇候選人

這可能是歐盟首席脫歐談判代表米歇爾·巴尼耶（Michel Barnier），他在與英國會談期間能夠讓27個國家保持同一頁面，給許多政府留下了深刻的印象。

但布魯塞爾謠言工廠目前最喜歡的幻想候選人是德國總理默克爾，儘管她沒有任何證據表明她對這份工作感興趣。

歐洲大選後的幾天將會出現控制歐洲各政黨對歐盟領導人的過程的競爭，歐盟領導人將在5月28日的特別峰會上討論這個問題。

BBC 獲得更多兼職資訊

#兼職 #News #新聞

[istmos]

Installation view of works by Gustav H Wolff and Giorgio Morandi at Documenta 1, Kassel, curated by Arnold Bode 1955, photo by Gunther Becker

*

(…)The history of Documenta, a quinquennial contemporary art exhibition founded in the German city of Kassel in 1955, is the story of the post-war avant-garde. Born out of the rubble of Nazism — Kassel was a manufacturing centre specialising in the production of tanks, and was heavily bombed during the Second World War — the state-funded exhibition sought to reframe attitudes to culture skewed by the Third Reich’s denunciation of entartete kunst, its attacks on free expression, and its recapitulation of art as propaganda. Unsurprisingly given the circumstances of its birth, Documenta has historically been defined by its profound suspicion of the systems of money and power that serve to instrumentalise art. It enshrines a vision of culture as a means of resisting the kind of group think — characterised by the passive acceptance of images and information — that precipitated Europe’s descent into chaos, and which now threatens to do so again.(…) Which brings us to 2017, and a Documenta divided — like Europe — between Germany and Greece. On the proposal of curator Adam Szymcyck, the exhibition opens for the first time in a foreign city, Athens, and will move to Kassel in June, spanning a total of 163 days. Much ink has already been spilled about the ethical implications of moving a German institution into the centre of a city wracked by its government’s insistence that Greece repay its debt (I’d refer you here to Iason Athanasiadis’s piece in ArtReview, which presents a more nuanced appraisal than most). There were protests against the opening in Athens, and an open letter, published by e-flux conversations and signed by ‘Artists Against Evictions’, accused visitors of blindness towards the grassroots social issues being played out on the city’s streets. Former Greek Finance Minister Yannis Varoufakis, no great friend to the Germans, has murmured darkly about cultural imperialism and poverty tourism. These contradictions will never adequately be resolved. Documenta 14 is damned if it does and damned if it doesn’t involve itself more directly in the politics of Athens. But this friction is entirely of a piece with the exhibition’s purpose, namely to bring to light the conflicts inherent in the production of culture. By electing to pursue this fraught and contradictory position, Szymcyck has raised the same questions of culture’s implication with politics — in this case with the economic systems that have impoverished Greece, with the fragmentation of Europe — that necessitated the foundation of Documenta in the first place.

(…)Art is a space in which to identify cultural changes and conflicts, and to consider how they might be represented (think about the debates that sprung up around, say, Dada). What does it mean now to make state-funded art? Is cultural exchange any longer possible in an era increasingly defined by the erection of borders between cultures and the aggressive policing of an essentialist identity politics? What happens to art which has as its only master the market? (…)As a point of contrast: at the same time that Documenta was opening its doors to the public in Athens, Damien Hirst held a private view for his latest show at the French collector Francois Pinault’s private museums in Venice. The Red Hot Chili Peppers played the after party. I wasn’t there, but I didn’t need to be, I’ve seen the pictures. The premise of the exhibition is that a team of divers has recovered sunken treasure from a galleon loaded with statuary. These include a marble sculpture of a mouse with a grafted ear clambering over a colossal foot, dressed up as a relic from antiquity, and Rihanna cast as an Egyptian goddess. It is, let’s be frank, a piece of shit. A child would dismiss this exhibition as beneath her dignity. The idiocy of the work, and those with the money to buy it, might at another time be laughed off. But the notion of presenting a show that has as its premise a Mediterranean shipwreck during a migrant crisis that has left thousands in the sea is appalling. That curators, gallerists and critics with a financial or merely career investment in the circus around Hirst will be forced to defend it is exemplary of those parts of the art world that so repel those outside its bubble. Documenta exists to counteract these commercially motivated tendencies towards a stupidity which amounts, when the reckoning comes, to complicity.(…)

http://www.thewhitereview.org/art/learning-from-athens/

#documenta #documenta 14 #kassel #athens #art #market #documenta 1

[antikorg]

[Video] Grèce 2015 : Varoufakis, adulte et responsable ou complice du capital ?

CADTM Le livre d’Eric Toussaint 6 octobre par Thierry Thoma (Capture d’écran de la vidéo) Nous publions cette vidéo explicative réalisée par Thierry Thomas. L’auteur revient sur la tragique expérience grecque en confrontant deux livres, Conversation entre adultes de Yannis Varoufakis, et Capitulation entre adultes, Grèce 2015 une alternative était possible d’Eric Toussaint. Sommaire : 00:00…

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#Yannis Varoufakis

[ombudsm-an]

‘Funemployment’ on the Other Side of the Planet

Each morning I awake to the same sight. The roof of my room is blindingly white, the walls slightly off-white. The Sgt. Pepper and David Bowie posters hung on the wall provide the only real vibrancy in the room. Light streams through the thin curtains that hang next to me, covering a double door to the back garden. They do their best, but it is a fruitless task. I need to speak to the agency about these fucking curtains. Hmm…

I find myself always on the right side of the bed, owing to the unevenness of the floorboards beneath me. My dooner has invariably ended up facing the opposite direction to how I remember it being when I fell asleep. I guess I thrash about whilst I am in the grip of a deep sleep? Hmm…

And then I wonder what the fuck I am going to do today. I’ve been in London now for a little over four months and it no longer feels new. My parents were in town a couple of weeks ago and that was great because I hadn’t seen them for a while and I felt like a tourist again. We went to museums and we walked and we ate great food and drunk a few pints of Guinness. But then I’m alone in my room again, and I lie there and I procrastinate. Hmm…

Coffee, cigarette, Twitter, Facebook, coffee, cigarette etc. This is generally how it goes in the morning. Then I’ll look for a job and maybe apply for one or two if there is anything decent going. Then read about Spain for a bit as I’m headed there in a couple of weeks to meet my parents again. Hmm…

Yannis Varoufakis’ new book sits beside me, but you kinda need to be in the right mood to get deep into the harsh economic realities of the Eurozone and Greece’s place within it. It is a fascinating book when I’m in the mood, but despite having absolutely nothing going on, the mind seems to drift easily. Maybe its cause that girl that I saw last week hasn’t messaged me back? I thought it went well. Hmm…

I know that I should be writing or doing something creative. I always know that. I’ve been toying with attempting proper fictional writing for the first time. There are a few outlines saved on here, but I don’t much know how to progress beyond that. Perhaps a trip to Foyles today to pick up a book about creative writing? Hmm…

There is always enough time left to log into internet banking and fret about the state of my finances. This is a fun game that i’ve taken part in for lets say my entire adult life. And I know deep down that I shouldn’t, that I am privileged as hell to be in the position I’m in. But that thought is never far from my mind. What if I run out of money? Back to Aus I guess. Hmm... 

[lhs3020b]

interstellarperformance said: I do hope the EU and GB can work out some kind of decent deal for people who want to work and reside abroad. But to be honest, yeah, I like it here but at the moment I can’t imagine staying beyond the two years that the process will take. :/                         

My guess is that it’s going to be “Brexit with no deal of any kind”, given the Tory Party’s absolute refusal to compromise on anything. Obviously they weren’t paying attention when Yannis Varoufakis tried to play 11-dimensional chess with the European Commission a couple of years go , and it turns out the EC will only play checkers, much to his loss.

I suspect also, insofar as there is a political strategy, it will be “blame foreigners and Remain supporters when everything goes wrong”, because stoking bigotry has worked well for the Tories so far.

If there is one single thing to hope for, I hope that Brexit ends up as an anchor-chain wrapped around Mrs May’s neck.

#LHS replies #interstellarperformance #Diary of a disaster