Yanis Varoufakis: How I
became an erratic Marxist
Before he entered politics, Yanis Varoufakis,
the iconoclastic Greek finance minister at
the centre of the latest eurozone standoff,
wrote this searing account of European
capitalism and and how the left can learn
from Marx’s mistakes
By Yanis Varoufakis
February 18, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Guardian" - In
2008, capitalism had its second global
spasm. The financial crisis set off a chain
reaction that pushed
Europe into a downward spiral that
continues to this day. Europe’s present
situation is not merely a threat for
workers, for the dispossessed, for the
bankers, for social classes or, indeed,
nations. No, Europe’s current posture poses
a threat to civilisation as we know it.
If my prognosis is correct,
and we are not facing just another cyclical
slump soon to be overcome, the question that
arises for radicals is this: should we
welcome this crisis of European capitalism
as an opportunity to replace it with a
better system? Or should we be so worried
about it as to embark upon a campaign for
stabilising European capitalism?
To me, the answer is
clear. Europe’s crisis is far less likely to
give birth to a better alternative to
capitalism than it is to unleash dangerously
regressive forces that have the capacity to
cause a humanitarian bloodbath, while
extinguishing the hope for any progressive
moves for generations to come.
For this view I have been
accused, by well-meaning radical voices, of
being “defeatist” and of trying to save an
indefensible European socioeconomic system.
This criticism, I confess, hurts. And it
hurts because it contains more than a kernel
of truth.
I share the view that this
European Union is typified by a large
democratic deficit that, in combination with
the denial of the faulty architecture of its
monetary union, has put Europe’s peoples on
a path to permanent recession. And I also
bow to the criticism that I have campaigned
on an agenda founded on the assumption that
the left was, and remains, squarely
defeated. I confess I would much rather be
promoting a radical agenda, the raison
d’être of which is to replace European
capitalism with a different system.
Yet my aim here is to
offer a window into my view of a repugnant
European capitalism whose implosion, despite
its many ills, should be avoided at all
costs. It is a confession intended to
convince radicals that we have a
contradictory mission: to arrest the
freefall of European capitalism in order to
buy the time we need to formulate its
alternative.
Why a Marxist?
When I chose the subject
of my doctoral thesis, back in 1982, I
deliberately focused on a highly
mathematical topic within which Marx’s
thought was irrelevant. When, later on, I
embarked on an academic career, as a
lecturer in mainstream economics
departments, the implicit contract between
myself and the departments that offered me
lectureships was that I would be teaching
the type of economic theory that left no
room for Marx. In the late 1980s, I was
hired by the University of Sydney’s school
of economics in order to keep out a leftwing
candidate (although I did not know this at
the time).
After I returned to Greece
in 2000, I threw my lot in with the future
prime minister George Papandreou, hoping to
help stem the return to power of a resurgent
right wing that wanted to push Greece
towards xenophobia both domestically and in
its foreign policy. As the whole world now
knows, Papandreou’s party not only failed to
stem xenophobia but, in the end, presided
over the most virulent neoliberal
macroeconomic policies that spearheaded the
eurozone’s so-called bailouts thus,
unwittingly, causing the return of Nazis to
the streets of Athens. Even though I
resigned as Papandreou’s adviser early in
2006, and turned into his government’s
staunchest critic during his mishandling of
the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public
interventions in the debate on
Greece and Europe have carried no whiff
of Marxism.
Given
all this, you may be puzzled to hear me call
myself a Marxist. But, in truth, Karl Marx
was responsible for framing my perspective
of the world we live in, from my childhood
to this day. This is not something that I
often volunteer to talk about in “polite
society” because the very mention of the
M-word switches audiences off. But I never
deny it either. After a few years of
addressing audiences with whom I do not
share an ideology, a need has crept up on me
to talk about Marx’s imprint on my thinking.
To explain why, while an unapologetic
Marxist, I think it is important to resist
him passionately in a variety of ways. To
be, in other words, erratic in one’s
Marxism.
If my whole academic
career largely ignored Marx, and my current
policy recommendations are impossible to
describe as Marxist, why bring up my Marxism
now? The answer is simple: Even my
non-Marxist economics was guided by a
mindset influenced by Marx.
A radical social theorist
can challenge the economic mainstream in two
different ways, I always thought. One way is
by means of immanent criticism. To accept
the mainstream’s axioms and then expose its
internal contradictions. To say: “I shall
not contest your assumptions but here is why
your own conclusions do not logically flow
on from them.” This was, indeed, Marx’s
method of undermining British political
economics. He accepted every axiom by Adam
Smith and David Ricardo in order to
demonstrate that, in the context of their
assumptions, capitalism was a contradictory
system. The second avenue that a radical
theorist can pursue is, of course, the
construction of alternative theories to
those of the establishment, hoping that they
will be taken seriously.
My view on this dilemma
has always been that the powers that be are
never perturbed by theories that embark from
assumptions different to their own. The only
thing that can destabilise and genuinely
challenge mainstream, neoclassical
economists is the demonstration of the
internal inconsistency of their own models.
It was for this reason that, from the very
beginning, I chose to delve into the guts of
neoclassical theory and to spend next to no
energy trying to develop alternative,
Marxist models of capitalism. My reasons, I
submit, were quite Marxist.
When called upon to
comment on the world we live in, I had no
alternative but to fall back on the Marxist
tradition which had shaped my thinking ever
since my metallurgist father impressed upon
me, when I was still a child, the effect of
technological innovation on the historical
process. How, for instance, the passage from
the bronze age to the iron age sped up
history; how the discovery of steel greatly
accelerated historical time; and how
silicon-based IT technologies are
fast-tracking socioeconomic and historical
discontinuities.
My first encounter with
Marx’s writings came very early in life, as
a result of the strange times I grew up in,
with Greece exiting the nightmare of the
neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74. What
caught my eye was Marx’s mesmerising gift
for writing a dramatic script for human
history, indeed for human damnation, that
was also laced with the possibility of
salvation and authentic spirituality.
Marx created a narrative
populated by workers, capitalists, officials
and scientists who were history’s dramatis
personae. They struggled to harness reason
and science in the context of empowering
humanity while, contrary to their
intentions, unleashing demonic forces that
usurped and subverted their own freedom and
humanity.
This dialectical
perspective, where everything is pregnant
with its opposite, and the eager eye with
which Marx discerned the potential for
change in what seemed to be the most
unchanging of social structures, helped me
to grasp the great contradictions of the
capitalist era. It dissolved the paradox of
an age that generated the most remarkable
wealth and, in the same breath, the most
conspicuous poverty. Today, turning to the
European crisis, the crisis in the
United States and the long-term stagnation
of Japanese capitalism, most commentators
fail to appreciate the dialectical process
under their nose. They recognise the
mountain of debts and banking losses but
neglect the opposite side of the same coin:
the mountain of idle savings that are
“frozen” by fear and thus fail to convert
into productive investments. A Marxist
alertness to binary oppositions might have
opened their eyes.
A major reason why
established opinion fails to come to terms
with contemporary reality is that it never
understood the dialectically tense “joint
production” of debts and surpluses, of
growth and unemployment, of wealth and
poverty, indeed of good and evil. Marx’s
script alerted us these binary oppositions
as the sources of history’s cunning.
From my first steps of
thinking like an economist, to this very
day, it occurred to me that Marx had made a
discovery that must remain at the heart of
any useful analysis of capitalism. It was
the discovery of another binary opposition
deep within human labour. Between labour’s
two quite different natures: i) labour as a
value-creating activity that can never be
quantified in advance (and is therefore
impossible to commodify), and ii) labour as
a quantity (eg, numbers of hours worked)
that is for sale and comes at a price. That
is what distinguishes labour from other
productive inputs such as electricity: its
twin, contradictory, nature. A
differentiation-cum-contradiction that
political economics neglected to make before
Marx came along and that mainstream
economics is steadfastly refusing to
acknowledge today.
Both electricity and
labour can be thought of as commodities.
Indeed, both employers and workers struggle
to commodify labour. Employers use all their
ingenuity, and that of their HR management
minions, to quantify, measure and homogenise
labour. Meanwhile, prospective employees go
through the wringer in an anxious attempt to
commodify their labour power, to write and
rewrite their CVs in order to portray
themselves as purveyors of quantifiable
labour units. And there’s the rub. If
workers and employers ever succeed in
commodifying labour fully, capitalism will
perish. This is an insight without which
capitalism’s tendency to generate crises can
never be fully grasped and, also, an insight
that no one has access to without some
exposure to Marx’s thought.
Science fiction becomes
documentary
In the classic 1953 film
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the
alien force does not attack us head on,
unlike in, say, HG Wells’s
The War of the Worlds. Instead, people
are taken over from within, until nothing is
left of their human spirit and emotions.
Their bodies are shells that used to contain
a free will and which now labour, go through
the motions of everyday “life”, and function
as human simulacra “liberated” from the
unquantifiable essence of human nature. This
is something like what would have transpired
if human labour had become perfectly
reducible to human capital and thus fit for
insertion into the vulgar economists’
models.
Every non-Marxist economic
theory that treats human and non-human
productive inputs as interchangeable assumes
that the dehumanisation of human labour is
complete. But if it could ever be completed,
the result would be the end of capitalism as
a system capable of creating and
distributing value. For a start, a society
of dehumanised automata would resemble a
mechanical watch full of cogs and springs,
each with its own unique function, together
producing a “good”: timekeeping. Yet if that
society contained nothing but other
automata, timekeeping would not be a “good”.
It would certainly be an “output” but why a
“good”? Without real humans to experience
the clock’s function, there can be no such
thing as “good” or “bad”.
If capital ever succeeds
in quantifying, and subsequently fully
commodifying, labour, as it is constantly
trying to, it will also squeeze that
indeterminate, recalcitrant human freedom
from within labour that allows for the
generation of value. Marx’s brilliant
insight into the essence of capitalist
crises was precisely this: the greater
capitalism’s success in turning labour into
a commodity the less the value of each unit
of output it generates, the lower the profit
rate and, ultimately, the nearer the next
recession of the economy as a system. The
portrayal of human freedom as an economic
category is unique in Marx, making possible
a distinctively dramatic and analytically
astute interpretation of capitalism’s
propensity to snatch recession, even
depression, from the jaws of growth.
When Marx was writing that
labour is the living, form-giving fire; the
transitoriness of things; their temporality;
he was making the greatest contribution any
economist has ever made to our understanding
of the acute contradiction buried inside
capitalism’s DNA. When he portrayed capital
as a “… force we must submit to … it
develops a cosmopolitan, universal energy
which breaks through every limit and every
bond and posts itself as the only policy,
the only universality the only limit and the
only bond”, he was highlighting the reality
that labour can be purchased by liquid
capital (ie money), in its commodity form,
but that it will always carry with it a will
hostile to the capitalist buyer. But Marx
was not just making a psychological,
philosophical or political statement. He
was, rather, supplying a remarkable analysis
of why the moment that labour (as an
unquantifiable activity) sheds this
hostility, it becomes sterile, incapable of
producing value.
At a time when neoliberals
have ensnared the majority in their
theoretical tentacles, incessantly
regurgitating the ideology of enhancing
labour productivity in an effort to enhance
competitiveness with a view to creating
growth etc, Marx’s analysis offers a
powerful antidote. Capital can never win in
its struggle to turn labour into an
infinitely elastic, mechanised input,
without destroying itself. That is what
neither the neoliberals nor the Keynesians
will ever grasp. “If the whole class of the
wage-labourer were to be annihilated by
machinery”, wrote Marx “how terrible that
would be for capital, which, without
wage-labour, ceases to be capital!”
What has Marx done for us?
Almost all schools of
thought, including those of some progressive
economists, like to pretend that, though
Marx was a powerful figure, very little of
his contribution remains relevant today. I
beg to differ. Besides having captured the
basic drama of capitalist dynamics, Marx has
given me the tools with which to become
immune to the toxic propaganda of
neoliberalism. For example, the idea that
wealth is privately produced and then
appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state,
through taxation, is easy to succumb to if
one has not been exposed first to Marx’s
poignant argument that precisely the
opposite applies: wealth is collectively
produced and then privately appropriated
through social relations of production and
property rights that rely, for their
reproduction, almost exclusively on false
consciousness.
In his recent book
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste,
the historian of economic thought, Philip
Mirowski, has highlighted the neoliberals’
success in convincing a large array of
people that markets are not just a useful
means to an end but also an end in
themselves. According to this view, while
collective action and public institutions
are never able to “get it right”, the
unfettered operations of decentralised
private interest are guaranteed to produce
not only the right outcomes but also the
right desires, character, ethos even. The
best example of this form of neoliberal
crassness is, of course, the debate on how
to deal with climate change. Neoliberals
have rushed in to argue that, if anything is
to be done, it must take the form of
creating a quasi-market for “bads” (eg an
emissions trading scheme), since only
markets “know” how to price goods and bads
appropriately. To understand why such a
quasi-market solution is bound to fail and,
more importantly, where the motivation comes
from for such “solutions”, one can do much
worse than to become acquainted with the
logic of capital accumulation that Marx
outlined and the
Polish economist Michal Kalecki adapted
to a world ruled by networked oligopolies.
In the 20th century, the
two political movements that sought their
roots in Marx’s thought were the communist
and social democratic parties. Both of them,
in addition to their other errors (and,
indeed, crimes) failed, to their detriment,
to follow Marx’s lead in a crucial regard:
instead of embracing liberty and rationality
as their rallying cries and organising
concepts, they opted for equality and
justice, bequeathing the concept of freedom
to the neoliberals. Marx was adamant: The
problem with capitalism is not that it is
unfair but that it is irrational, as it
habitually condemns whole generations to
deprivation and unemployment and even turns
capitalists into angst-ridden automata,
living in permanent fear that unless they
commodify their fellow humans fully so as to
serve capital accumulation more efficiently,
they will cease to be capitalists. So, if
capitalism appears unjust this is because it
enslaves everyone; it wastes human and
natural resources; the same production line
that pumps out remarkable gizmos and untold
wealth, also produces deep unhappiness and
crises.
Having failed to couch a
critique of capitalism in terms of freedom
and rationality, as Marx thought essential,
social democracy and the left in general
allowed the neoliberals to usurp the mantle
of freedom and to win a spectacular triumph
in the contest of ideologies.
Perhaps the most
significant dimension of the neoliberal
triumph is what has come to be known as the
“democratic deficit”. Rivers of crocodile
tears have flowed over the decline of our
great democracies during the past three
decades of financialisation and
globalisation. Marx would have laughed long
and hard at those who seem surprised, or
upset, by the “democratic deficit”. What was
the great objective behind 19th-century
liberalism? It was, as Marx never tired of
pointing out, to separate the economic
sphere from the political sphere and to
confine politics to the latter while leaving
the economic sphere to capital. It is
liberalism’s splendid success in achieving
this long-held goal that we are now
observing. Take a look at South Africa
today, more than two decades after Nelson
Mandela was freed and the political sphere,
at long last, embraced the whole population.
The ANC’s predicament was that, in order to
be allowed to dominate the political sphere,
it had to give up power over the economic
one. And if you think otherwise, I suggest
that you talk to the dozens of miners gunned
down by armed guards paid by their employers
after they dared demand a wage rise.
Why erratic?
Having explained why I owe
whatever understanding of our social world I
may possess largely to Karl Marx, I now want
to explain why I remain terribly angry with
him. In other words, I shall outline why I
am by choice an erratic, inconsistent
Marxist. Marx committed two spectacular
mistakes, one of them an error of omission,
the other one of commission. Even today,
these mistakes still hamper the left’s
effectiveness, especially in Europe.
Marx’s first error – the
error of omission was that he failed to give
sufficient thought to the impact of his own
theorising on the world that he was
theorising about. His theory is discursively
exceptionally powerful, and Marx had a sense
of its power. So how come he showed no
concern that his disciples, people with a
better grasp of these powerful ideas than
the average worker, might use the power
bestowed upon them, via Marx’s own ideas, in
order to abuse other comrades, to build
their own power base, to gain positions of
influence?
Marx’s second error, the
one I ascribe to commission, was worse. It
was his assumption that truth about
capitalism could be discovered in the
mathematics of his models. This was the
worst disservice he could have delivered to
his own theoretical system. The man who
equipped us with human freedom as a
first-order economic concept; the scholar
who elevated radical indeterminacy to its
rightful place within political economics;
he was the same person who ended up toying
around with simplistic algebraic models, in
which labour units were, naturally, fully
quantified, hoping against hope to evince
from these equations some additional
insights about capitalism. After his death,
Marxist economists wasted long careers
indulging a similar type of scholastic
mechanism. Fully immersed in irrelevant
debates on “the transformation problem” and
what to do about it, they eventually became
an almost extinct species, as the neoliberal
juggernaut crushed all dissent in its path.
How could Marx be so
deluded? Why did he not recognise that no
truth about capitalism can ever spring out
of any mathematical model, however brilliant
the modeller may be? Did he not have the
intellectual tools to realise that
capitalist dynamics spring from the
unquantifiable part of human labour; ie from
a variable that can never be well-defined
mathematically? Of course he did, since he
forged these tools! No, the reason for his
error is a little more sinister: just like
the vulgar economists that he so brilliantly
admonished (and who continue to dominate the
departments of economics today), he coveted
the power that mathematical “proof” afforded
him.
If I am right, Marx knew
what he was doing. He understood, or had the
capacity to know, that a comprehensive
theory of value cannot be accommodated
within a mathematical model of a dynamic
capitalist economy. He was, I have no doubt,
aware that a proper economic theory must
respect the idea that the rules of the
undetermined are themselves undetermined. In
economic terms this meant a recognition that
the market power, and thus the
profitability, of capitalists was not
necessarily reducible to their capacity to
extract labour from employees; that some
capitalists can extract more from a given
pool of labour or from a given community of
consumers for reasons that are external to
Marx’s own theory.
Alas, that recognition
would be tantamount to accepting that his
“laws” were not immutable. He would have to
concede to competing voices in the trades
union movement that his theory was
indeterminate and, therefore, that his
pronouncements could not be uniquely and
unambiguously correct. That they were
permanently provisional. This determination
to have the complete, closed story, or
model, the final word, is something I cannot
forgive Marx for. It proved, after all,
responsible for a great deal of error and,
more significantly, authoritarianism. Errors
and authoritarianism that are largely
responsible for the left’s current impotence
as a force of good and as a check on the
abuses of reason and liberty that the
neoliberal crew are overseeing today.
Mrs Thatcher’s lesson
I moved to England to
attend university in September 1978, six
months or so before Margaret Thatcher’s
victory changed Britain forever. Watching
the Labour government disintegrate, under
the weight of its degenerate social
democratic programme, led me to a serious
error: to the thought that Thatcher’s
victory could be a good thing, delivering to
Britain’s working and middle classes the
short, sharp shock necessary to reinvigorate
progressive politics; to give the left a
chance to create a fresh, radical agenda for
a new type of effective, progressive
politics.
Even as unemployment
doubled and then trebled, under Thatcher’s
radical neoliberal interventions, I
continued to harbour hope that Lenin was
right: “Things have to get worse before they
get better.” As life became nastier, more
brutish and, for many, shorter, it occurred
to me that I was tragically in error: things
could get worse in perpetuity, without ever
getting better. The hope that the
deterioration of public goods, the
diminution of the lives of the majority, the
spread of deprivation to every corner of the
land would, automatically, lead to a
renaissance of the left was just that: hope.
The reality was, however,
painfully different. With every turn of the
recession’s screw, the left became more
introverted, less capable of producing a
convincing progressive agenda and,
meanwhile, the working class was being
divided between those who dropped out of
society and those co-opted into the
neoliberal mindset. My hope that Thatcher
would inadvertently bring about a new
political revolution was well and truly
bogus. All that sprang out of Thatcherism
were extreme financialisation, the triumph
of the shopping mall over the corner store,
the fetishisation of housing and Tony Blair.
Instead of radicalising
British society, the recession that
Thatcher’s government so carefully
engineered, as part of its class war against
organised labour and against the public
institutions of social security and
redistribution that had been established
after the war, permanently destroyed the
very possibility of radical, progressive
politics in Britain. Indeed, it rendered
impossible the very notion of values that
transcended what the market determined as
the “right” price.
The lesson Thatcher taught
me about the capacity of a long‑lasting
recession to undermine progressive politics,
is one that I carry with me into today’s
European crisis. It is, indeed, the most
important determinant of my stance in
relation to the crisis. It is the reason I
am happy to confess to the sin I am accused
of by some of my critics on the left: the
sin of choosing not to propose radical
political programs that seek to exploit the
crisis as an opportunity to overthrow
European capitalism, to dismantle the awful
eurozone, and to undermine the European
Union of the cartels and the bankrupt
bankers.
Yes, I would love to put
forward such a radical agenda. But, no, I am
not prepared to commit the same error twice.
What good did we achieve in Britain in the
early 1980s by promoting an agenda of
socialist change that British society
scorned while falling headlong into
Thatcher’s neoliberal trap? Precisely none.
What good will it do today to call for a
dismantling of the eurozone, of the European
Union itself, when European capitalism is
doing its utmost to undermine the eurozone,
the European Union, indeed itself?
A Greek or a Portuguese or
an Italian exit from the eurozone would soon
lead to a fragmentation of European
capitalism, yielding a seriously
recessionary surplus region east of the
Rhine and north of the Alps, while the rest
of Europe is would be in the grip of vicious
stagflation. Who do you think would benefit
from this development? A progressive left,
that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes
of Europe’s public institutions? Or the
Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists,
the xenophobes and the spivs? I have
absolutely no doubt as to which of the two
will do best from a disintegration of the
eurozone.
I, for one, am not
prepared to blow fresh wind into the sails
of this postmodern version of the 1930s. If
this means that it is we, the suitably
erratic Marxists, who must try to save
European capitalism from itself, so be it.
Not out of love for European capitalism, for
the eurozone, for Brussels, or for the
European Central Bank, but just because we
want to minimise the unnecessary human toll
from this crisis.
What should Marxists do?
Europe’s elites are
behaving today as if they understand neither
the nature of the crisis that they are
presiding over, nor its implications for the
future of European civilisation.
Atavistically, they are choosing to plunder
the diminishing stocks of the weak and the
dispossessed in order to plug the gaping
holes of the financial sector, refusing to
come to terms with the unsustainability of
the task.
Yet with Europe’s elites
deep in denial and disarray, the left must
admit that we are just not ready to plug the
chasm that a collapse of European capitalism
would open up with a functioning socialist
system. Our task should then be twofold.
First, to put forward an analysis of the
current state of play that non-Marxist, well
meaning Europeans who have been lured by the
sirens of neoliberalism, find insightful.
Second, to follow this sound analysis up
with proposals for stabilising Europe – for
ending the downward spiral that, in the end,
reinforces only the bigots.
Let me now conclude with
two confessions. First, while I am happy to
defend as genuinely radical the pursuit of a
modest agenda for stabilising a system that
I criticise, I shall not pretend to be
enthusiastic about it. This may be what we
must do, under the present circumstances,
but I am sad that I shall probably not be
around to see a more radical agenda being
adopted.
My final confession is of
a highly personal nature: I know that I run
the risk of, surreptitiously, lessening the
sadness from ditching any hope of replacing
capitalism in my lifetime by indulging a
feeling of having become agreeable to the
circles of polite society. The sense of
self-satisfaction from being feted by the
high and mighty did begin, on occasion, to
creep up on me. And what a non-radical,
ugly, corruptive and corrosive sense it was.
My personal nadir came at
an airport. Some moneyed outfit had invited
me to give a keynote speech on the European
crisis and had forked out the ludicrous sum
necessary to buy me a first-class ticket. On
my way back home, tired and with several
flights under my belt, I was making my way
past the long queue of economy passengers,
to get to my gate. Suddenly I noticed, with
horror, how easy it was for my mind to be
infected with the sense that I was entitled
to bypass the hoi polloi. I realised how
readily I could forget that which my
leftwing mind had always known: that nothing
succeeds in reproducing itself better than a
false sense of entitlement. Forging
alliances with reactionary forces, as I
think we should do to stabilise Europe
today, brings us up against the risk of
becoming co-opted, of shedding our
radicalism through the warm glow of having
“arrived” in the corridors of power.
Radical confessions, like
the one I have attempted here, are perhaps
the only programmatic antidote to
ideological slippage that threatens to turn
us into cogs of the machine. If we are to
forge alliances with our political
adversaries we must avoid becoming like the
socialists who failed to change the world
but succeeded in improving their private
circumstances. The trick is to avoid the
revolutionary maximalism that, in the end,
helps the neoliberals bypass all opposition
to their self-defeating policies and to
retain in our sights capitalism’s inherent
failures while trying to save it, for
strategic purposes, from itself.
This article is
adapted from a lecture
originally delivered at the 6th Subversive
Festival in Zagreb in 2013