[P2P-F] Fwd: [NetworkedLabour] What should have been done in Greece.

Wed Jul 15 10:29:54 CEST 2015

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Frederic Janssens <fjanss at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 11:39 PM
Subject: Re: [NetworkedLabour] What should have been done in Greece.
To: Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
Cc: Christian Fuchs <christian.fuchs at uti.at>, "
networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org" <networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org>

Concerning the attitude of Syriza towards Grexit, here is what Yanis
Varoufakis tells in an interview

(linked to by
sebastian at rolux.org on nettime list) :

http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2015/07/exclusive-yanis-varoufakis-opens-about-his-five-month-battle-save-greece

:

HL: You must have been thinking about a Grexit from day one...

YV: Yes, absolutely.

HL: ...have preparations been made?

YV: The answer is yes and no. We had a small group, a ???war cabinet'
within the ministry, of about five people that were doing this: so we
worked out in theory, on paper, everything that had to be done [to prepare
for/in the event of a Grexit]. But it's one thing to do that at the level
of 4-5 people, it's quite another to prepare the country for it. To prepare
the country an executive decision had to be taken, and that decision was
never taken.

HL: And in the past week, was that a decision you felt you were leaning
towards [preparing for Grexit]?

YV: My view was, we should be very careful not to activate it. I didn't
want this to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn't want this to be
like Nietzsche's famous dictum that if you stare into the abyss long
enough, the abyss will stare back at you. But I also believed that at the
moment the Eurogroup shut out banks down, we should energise this process.

HL: Right. So there were two options as far as I can see - an immediate
Grexit, or printing IOUs and taking bank control of the Bank of Greece
[potentially but not necessarily precipitating a Grexit]?

YV: Sure, sure. I never believed we should go straight to a new currency.
My view was - and I put this to the government - that if they dared shut
our banks down, which I considered to be an aggressive move of incredible
potency, we should respond aggressively but without crossing the point of
no return.

We should issue our own IOUs, or even at least announce that we're going to
issue our own euro-denominated liquidity; we should haircut the Greek 2012
bonds that the ECB held, or announce we were going to do it; and we should
take control of the Bank of Greece. This was the triptych, the three
things, which I thought we should respond with if the ECB shut down our
banks.

... I was warning the Cabinet this was going to happen [the ECB shut our
banks] for a month, in order to drag us into a humiliating agreement. When
it happened - and many of my colleagues couldn't believe it happened - my
recommendation for responding "energetically", let's say, was voted down.

HL: And how close was it to happening?

YV: Well let me say that out of six people we were in a minority of two.
... Once it didn't happen I got my orders to close down the banks
consensually with the ECB and the Bank of Greece, which I was against, but
I did because I'm a team player, I believe in collective responsibility.

And then the referendum happened, and the referendum gave us an amazing
boost, one that would have justified this type of energetic response [his
plan] against the ECB, but then that very night the government decided that
the will of the people, this resounding ???No', should not be what
energised the energetic approach [his plan].

Instead it should lead to major concessions to the other side: the meeting
of the council of political leaders, with our Prime Minister accepting the
premise that whatever happens, whatever the other side does, we will never
respond in any way that challenges them. And essentially that means
folding. ... You cease to negotiate.

-- 

Frederic

-- 
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