Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis managed to stir a great deal of controversy in a documentary aired in Germany Today on Tuesday evening. “Clever people in Brussels, in Frankfurt and in Berlin.

The economist Yanis Varoufakis has called for a one-day boycott of Amazon on Black Friday as trade unionists, environmental activists, privacy campaigners and tax justice advocates plan coordinated actions against the company’s sites and supply chain.

Amazon’s success during the coronavirus pandemic – at one point the company was reported to be making sales of $11,000 (£8,200) a second – has vastly inflated its share price, increasing the personal wealth of its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, already the world’s richest man, by $70bn. Bloomberg estimates his current wealth to be $187bn.

In an online video, Varoufakis asks viewers “not even to visit” Amazon’s website on Black Friday – the retail industry’s most profitable day of the year – which falls on 27 November this year.

Yanis Varoufakis Net Worth

“By boycotting Amazon you will be adding your strength to an international coalition of workers and activists,” he said. “Amazon is not a mere company. It is not merely a monopolistic mega-firm. It is far more, and far worse, than that. It is the pillar of a new techno-feudalism.”

Under a banner of “make Amazon pay”, Friday’s actions are intended as the start of a campaign against the retailer’s record on workers’ rights, environmental impact, tax avoidance, work with police and immigration authorities, and what activists say are invasions of privacy via its growing range of internet-connected devices.

The campaign is co-convened by Progressive International, a global initiative bringing together progressive leftwing groups, politicians and intellectuals, including Varoufakis, Prof Noam Chomsky and Bernie Sanders, and UNI Global, a trade union federation representing 20 million workers including the UK’s GMB union.

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Casper Gelderblom, Progressive International’s campaign lead said: “Trillion-dollar corporations like Amazon have too much power and are too large for a single government, trade union or organisation to rein in. That’s why workers, citizens and activists are coming together across borders and issues to take the power back.”

A set of demands submitted to Amazon by Progressive International and signed by Oxfam, 350.org, Greenpeace and the Tax Justice Network, said: “Amazon warehouse workers risked their lives as essential workers, and only briefly received an increase in pay.”

The first actions are due to take place in Sydney, Australia, with protests at Amazon facilities by the SDA and TWU trade unions. Protests are also planned for the Philippines, Bangladesh, India, Poland, Italy, Sweden, Luxembourg, France, the US and Brazil.

In Germany, the trade union Verdi has organised three-day strikes at Amazon warehouses, demanding better pay and working conditions. In the UK, where protest is effectively banned under coronavirus regulations, GMB members will stage an online rally. Supporters are being asked to endorse the demands and donate to strike funds for Amazon workers.

An Amazon spokesperson said of the campaign: “This is a series of misleading assertions by misinformed or self-interested groups who are using Amazon’s profile to further their individual causes. Amazon has a strong track record of supporting our employees, our customers, and our communities, including providing safe working conditions, competitive wages and great benefits, leading on climate change with the Climate Pledge commitment to be net zero carbon by 2040, and paying billions of pounds in taxes globally.”

Yanis Varoufakis Another Now

I suspect that one of the most enduring legacies of the Greek crisis may be the making of Yanis Varoufakis into a global opinion leader.

It is a curious phenomenon. Varoufakis was the leading Greek negotiator in a round of talks with the European Union that can euphemistically be considered not a great success – from the Greeks’ own perspective.

Varoufakis and the Syriza government came to power after the general elections in late January. Insofar as the Greek economy is concerned, before they won the election forecasters expected positive growth: instead, they reduced the economy to shambles. They bet on their capacity to twist the wrists of European leaders, over “austerity”. They failed.

It doesn’t seem to matter at all.

I actually had a moment of sympathy for Varoufakis, after listening to this excellent EconTalk. I’ve since read a Varoufakis’ text that is supposed to be both personal and theoretical, these “Confessions of an erratic Marxist in the midst of a repugnant European crisis“. This is basically a talk that Varoufakis gave in 2013.
Here Varoufakis fashions himself as a new Keynes, convinced that “the Left’s historical duty, at this particular juncture, is to stabilise capitalism; to save European capitalism from itself and from the inane handlers of the Eurozone’s inevitable crisis”.

Varoufakis quotes a lot of science fiction, from Star Trek Voyager (I thought nobody really liked that!), to The Matrix, a movie he considered “overshadowed” by Karl Marx:

…the machines were soon to discover that humans do not last long when their spirit is broken and their freedom utterly deprived. (…) So, the machines obliged us with what Marx would have called a ‘false consciousness’. They forced not only nutrients into our bodies but also illusions that our spirit craved into our minds. Ingeniously, they attached electrodes to our skulls with which they fed, directly into our brain, a virtual, yet utterly realistic, life that, as humans, we could cope with. While our bodies were still brutally plugged into their power generators, feeding them with electricity sourced from our body heat, the machines’ computer program known as The Matrix filled our minds with an imaginary, illusory yet very ‘real’ ‘normal’ life. That way our bodies, oblivious to reality, could live for decades, to the great utility of the machines responsible for generating enough power to sustain their new world.
(…) The Matrix is no futurology. It has been part of our reality for a while now! It is a top-notch documentary of our era or, to be more precise, of the tendency of our era to bleach out of human labour all those characteristics that prevent it from becoming fully flexible, perfectly quantified, infinitely divisible. As for Marx, his role was to provide us with the option of the ‘red pill’; a chance to stare in the face, without the soothing illusions of bourgeois ideology, the ugly reality of a system that produces crises and deprivation as a matter of course, by design, and certainly not by accident.

You can read the whole thing. Varoufakis makes a good point on the European Union’s group thinking (“Both Soviet and EU apparatchiks share a Christian sects’ determination to acknowledge facts only if they are congruent with prophesy and their sacred texts.”) and says plenty of rather bizarre things: from Thatcher having “carefully engineered” recessions to Marx not having been dialectic enough because he did not predict “the possibility that the creation of a workers’ state would force capitalism to become more civilised”.

All in all, the Varoufakis essay seems to be one of those cases in which confusion can be mistaken for profundity by superficial readers. This would not hurt him. Plus, he is considered an enemy of some people lots of newspapers’ readers love to loathe: Mrs Merkel and her finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

In his “Confessions”, Varoufakis (who seems to be quite a patrician himself) wrote that “we must avoid becoming like the socialists who failed to change the world but succeeded in improve… their private circumstances”.

And yet, good for him, this is exactly the outcome of his short time in Greek government. As a Minister, he has nothing to exhibit as success. But an intense countenance, an elaborately casual look, and his colourful prose makes him a perfect fit for the world of celebrities. I suppose this is another proof of the immense powers of “commodification” of global capitalism.