Another Now Read online

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  Talking to My Daughter: A Brief History of Capitalism (2017)

  Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment (2017)

  And the Weak Suffer What They Must?: Europe, Austerity and the Threat to Global Stability (2016)

  The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy (2011)

  ANOTHER NOW

  Copyright © Yanis Varoufakis 2021

  All rights reserved

  First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head, 2020

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  mhpbooks.com

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781612199573

  Ebook ISBN 9781612199566

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940498

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  a_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  By the Same Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Afterword

  About the Author

  For Danaë,

  without whom Another Now would be unimaginable and This Now intolerable

  FOREWORD

  A year ago today we buried Iris in a red and black coffin. Red for the revolutionary fire constantly blazing in her belly. And black to remind us, as she kept doing, of the irreducible dark side in us all.

  Iris’s funeral was as she would have wanted it, save for Eva’s absence. The tributes provided a fitting encomium for my extraordinary friend but the words washed over me. Some twenty years had passed since I had last seen Iris and Eva together. They had been sitting on Iris’s patio, Eva holding her usual glass of Pinot Grigio, Iris scolding her in tirades punctuated only by mouthfuls of chilled vodka. Why on earth did Iris ever take Eva under her wing? I recall wondering.

  For a woman who could never have conceived of a good market, a noble war or an unjust strike, it was an improbable friendship. Eva was a recovering investment banker turned true-blue, dry, academic economist. Far from having a winning personality, if anything she exemplified Oscar Wilde’s definition of the cynic – she who knows everything about prices but nothing about values. ‘And I’m not even sure she has a clue about prices!’ Iris once said teasingly in her presence. Nonetheless, as Iris’s casket was being lowered into the ground, Eva’s absence weighed heavily.

  With Iris and Eva gone, Costa was the only other one left of our old gang. On the day Iris died I had messaged him twice, using an old number I still had. To no avail. Resigned to endure the funeral without him, I was surprised when I glimpsed him there. He was not easy to spot, a solitary figure leaning against a plane tree, watching from a distance as Iris descended to her resting place.

  Once the mourners began slowly to disperse, I approached him, and his face thankfully brightened up. Though his youthful cheerfulness was all but gone, his eyes still glimmered with his characteristic blend of brilliance and sentimentality. But as we talked he seemed harried and close to paranoia, focused terribly on ‘the diary’ and how important it was that it should not fall into ‘the wrong hands’. It was then that I realized Iris had been in cahoots with him before she had summoned me to the hospice, two weeks before her body gave in to the cancer.

  Iris’s summons arrived in late June 2035, jolting me out of a two-decade-long seclusion. The last time I had seen either of them was in August 2015 as I was passing through Brighton for one last time, my life in the early stages of an unrelated meltdown. As soon as I entered her room in the hospice, Iris struggled to sit up, determined to muster all her fading energy to receive me. Dismissing any preliminaries, she pointed to a diary sitting on her bedside table and gestured for me to take it. ‘It comes with a directive and an injunction,’ she whispered.

  The directive was unequivocal. I was to focus on the ‘dispatches’ in the diary and use them ‘to open people’s eyes to possibilities they are incapable of imagining unaided’. As for the injunction, she made me promise I would not reveal any of the ‘technical details’ in it. ‘In due course you will know what I mean,’ she muttered. Finally, in a bid to lighten the atmosphere, she told me with typical bluntness and bossiness, ‘Get stuck in to it the moment I’m dead and buried.’ Eager not to burden her further, I held her hand and made the promise she had demanded.

  Little did I know that ‘in due course’ meant Costa appearing at her funeral to deliver my instructions, which he did breathlessly in a quiet corner of the graveyard car park. When reading Iris’s diary, he said, I had to take precautions against the corporates: ‘Iris wanted you to have her diary. She wanted our story told so that the world understands there is an alternative. But I know she warned you of the one, strict condition: none of the detailed information in the diary regarding my technologies should fall into their hands. Tell me that you understand!’

  I reassured him that I did. He stared into my eyes to confirm my sincerity. ‘We had it wrong all these years, Yango,’ he said eventually. ‘We knew that everything about us was being commodified. That everything we did and said was being captured and sold on. But what we had not realized was that the process of digitizing everything about us was proletarianizing everyone, including the bosses. Think about it, Yango. Think about it.’

  It had been a while since I had found myself on the receiving end of such an outburst, but it seemed somehow appropriate, given that we had just laid to rest the greatest agitator of revolutionary politics I had ever known.

  ‘What does it mean to be a proletarian, really?’ Costa continued, without waiting for a reply. ‘Let me tell you. From bitter experience. It means you are a cog in a process of production that relies on what you do and think while excluding you from being anything but its product. It means the end of sovereignty, the conversion of all experiential value into exchange value, the final defeat of autonomy.’

  Without a clue as to why he was telling me all this, I agreed.

  ‘This is why I am still here, Yango. Why I stayed behind. To prevent our final defeat at those bastards’ hands. I can’t stop them inventing it for themselves but I’ll be damned if I let them grab mine and use it to squeeze the last drop of humanity out of us all.’

  Satisfied that I had been adequately briefed, Costa took a device from his backpack and placed it firmly in my hands. ‘It’s a dampening field device. Idiot proof,’ he said with a hint of contempt. He showed me how to switch it on to prevent the ‘bastards’ from gaining access to Iris’s diary.

  Hoping to catch up properly after all these years, I suggested dinner or at least a drink. Costa simply stared into my eyes, gave me a tight hug and left without looking back.

  Watching him walk away, his eyes fixed on the ground, the lyrics of a melancholy Greek song I had learned as a teenager sprang to mind.

  Late last night I saw a friend wandering

  A hobgoblin-like relic on a motorbike

  Stray dogs chasing after him

  Through deserted streets

  I was reminded in turn of a solemn middle-aged visitor in a shabby raincoat who had stopped at our home in Athens one winter night to give my father some tattered old communist literature. ‘We shared a police cell in 1946,’ Dad whispered
sadly when his comrade later left into the cold, wet night.

  But Costa’s words reminded me of someone else: Sam, the main character in an old sci-fi flick. A miner slaving away on the dark side of the moon, Sam is driven mad when he discovers that he is one of many clones that have been created by his company as a supply of cheap, disposable workers, and that he has been duped with implanted memories into believing his long-dead family are still alive back on earth, awaiting his return. Science fiction is the archaeology of the future, a leftist philosopher once said. It is now on the verge of offering the best documentary of our present.

  Friends’ funerals usually leave me numb but functional. But on returning from the cemetery after Iris’s, I struggled to steal back into my present. The leather-bound diary that Iris wanted me to have lay tantalizingly on the desk. I ignored it for the rest of the day, but in the early hours of the following morning I surrendered. I sat at the desk and opened its heavy cover.

  Two red arrows filled my vision as my hybrid-reality contact lenses detected audio-visual content in the diary and kicked in. Instinctively I gestured to switch off my haptic interface and slammed the book shut. Costa had explicitly instructed me to set up the dampening field device before opening the diary. Chastened by my failure to do so, I went to fetch it. Only once the device was on the desk, humming away reassuringly, was I able to delve into Iris’s memories in that rarest of conditions – privacy.

  It took nine days and nights to go through the diary, taking in Iris’s handwritten remembrances as well as all the audio-visual content embedded in its pages. Halfway through I stumbled upon the extraordinary events of 2025 involving her and Costa and Eva, and came to understand why Iris was so keen for their story to be told. Once I had been through it all, for two long months I struggled to fend off the urge to do what I always do when upset or destabilized: to write. Instead, I used those sixty days to digest the material properly, to read, to watch and to listen to it again and again and again.

  The tale contained in Iris’s diary shook me deeply. Iris knew this would be so, just as she knew that I would find it impossible not to write it up, for better or for worse. The book you are about to read, dear reader, took another nine and a half months to write. And so it is, exactly a year after we buried Iris in that red and black coffin, that I am now ready, with a single keystroke, to deliver the manuscript to her publisher. If only there was some way she could tell me what I have missed.

  The bulk of the diary, and the majority of what follows, is taken up with a series of dialogues. It was these intellectual and political debates that concerned Iris, far more than the events that led to them. In an attempt to do full justice to my friends’ ideas and points of view, I have found it necessary to recount these debates as if I had been witness to them myself, pretending to inhabit a past from which I was mostly absent, fleshing out conversations I never participated in. In the process, I have necessarily imputed thoughts and feelings to Iris, Eva and Costa that are the product of my imagination – but only because I felt such additions were essential to conveying the essence of their experiences, of who these good people truly were. For all my liberties, and failures, I apologize profusely and happily.

  Yango Varo, 10.05 a.m.

  Saturday 28 July 2036

  1

  MODERNITY’S VANQUISHED

  Iris

  Iris and I met in the dystopia that was English university life. We were both miserable, she at Sussex, me at Essex. ‘Sex with a prefix,’ we used to joke. It was early in 1982 that our paths first crossed – at the London School of Economics, in one of the countless meetings convened in those days by left-wing activists for the purpose of fighting Thatcherism. After two hours of tedious speakers huffing and puffing on the podium, Iris rose to make her contribution. She was magnificent.

  ‘While listening to the previous speakers,’ she said in a resolute but playful tone, ‘I was thinking to myself, Give me Maggie Thatcher any time!’ Evidently relishing the expressions of dismay from the audience, she continued: ‘Unlike you, my friends, Maggie gets it. We live in a revolutionary moment. The post-war class-war armistice is over. If we want to defend the weak, we can’t be defensive. We need to advocate as she does: out with the old system, in with a brand new one. Not Maggie’s dystopic one, but a brand new one nevertheless. You lot are bandaging corpses while Thatcher is digging graves. If I were condemned to choose between you and her, I would choose her any time. However monstrous she may be, she can at least be subverted!’

  It was my baptism with Iris’s fiery spirit. But while her words resonated strongly with many of us, they also guaranteed her ostracism. Radicals tend to take exception at being denounced as banal. When once I accused her of being a lone wolf rather than a believer in solidarity, she replied proudly and without a scintilla of irony, ‘That’s me!’

  As the years passed, Iris’s natural fondness for alienating those who broadly agreed with her world view grew in proportion to society’s adoption of its opposite. Thatcher’s greatest triumph, in her opinion, was that she had made it impossible to imagine anyone doing anything unless there was something in it for them. Contrarian to the bone, Iris was appalled and energized by the realization that everyone was at it, coveting unfettered power where they could get it – including in public meetings denouncing Thatcher, the City and the more refined forms of greed. Iris was thus a passionate feminist who could not stand most feminists, considering them privileged actors with a fear of sexual freedom and a habit of speaking on behalf of, and over, those who ought to be leading the movement against patriarchy. She was a lesbian who also had sex with men out of ‘a penchant for solidarity with the defective sex and a predilection for pissing off lesbians’. She was a Marxist who despised most Marxists for using Marx’s emancipatory narrative to abuse other comrades, build their own power base, gain positions of influence, bed impressionable students, eventually take control of the politburo and throw anyone who questioned them into the gulag. Above all else, Iris was a thinking radical’s thinking radical. Energetic and brilliant one moment, vexing and maddening the next.

  That evening at the London School of Economics we struck up a conversation, possibly because I was the only one in the audience to applaud her. A few months later, on a dreary December night in 1982, Iris called to say that she was helping plan a mass women’s rally outside some RAF base against the deployment of American cruise missiles targeting eastern Europe. Could I turn up to support them? I arrived at Greenham Common late the following day. In the pouring rain 30,000 women tried to join hands around the base in the face of determined opposition by the police. Just as I decided that it would be impossible to find Iris in the mayhem I spotted her on the cold, muddy ground, two women kneeling by her side holding a handkerchief to a bleeding gash on her forehead. ‘From an overzealous defender of the realm,’ she told me grinning proudly.

  A young-looking twenty-eight-year-old, Iris was at that point three years into a social anthropology lectureship, having returned from field work in Africa, where she had compiled lexicons and written down the grammar of the languages spoken by two Cameroonian tribes. Several years her junior, I was struggling with my own PhD on mathematical models, which Iris dismissed, not without some justification, as ‘fine exercises in logical-positivist masturbation’. Over the five years that followed, in between our university duties, we would join multiple doomed causes together – the 1984–5 miners’ strike and the 1986-7 Wapping dispute the most demoralizing of them. One hundred and five weeks, in aggregate, of picketing, fundraising and being on the wrong side of history should either have pushed us apart or forged an unbreakable friendship.

  I remember visiting her one day in hospital in 1987, after mounted police had trampled all over her outside Rupert Murdoch’s gleaming Wapping site, and asking if the fear of physical harm had ever brought her close to giving up. Iris replied that when you join a good struggle you learn to live life in near proximity
to giving up without ever actually doing so. No, her only regret was that we were putting up such a splendid fight in defence of communities that deserved defending but in pursuit of causes that screamed ‘anachronism’. ‘Why can’t we bring the country to its knees to demand clean energy and a free press, instead of defending dirty coal-fired power stations and the male trade union bosses of a right-wing newspaper?’

  Defeat could never sully Iris’s sweet delight in fighting against the odds. No rout could dampen her enthusiasm – ‘No good cause is ever lost,’ she liked to say – only the fear that we were lions being sent to the battlefields by donkeys. She distinguished between two types of self-proclaimed progressive leaders. Those defending privileges bestowed upon them by the dying post-war order and the others, the more radical ones, bent on replacing the prevailing order with a different but equally oppressive patriarchy. It was only as I was driving her home to Brighton from hospital that same evening that I realized how haunted she was by this conviction.

  ‘OK, let’s say we are the vanguard. But the vanguard for bloody what?’ Breaking a long silence, Iris’s outburst startled me. ‘Mark my words. The moment our comrades get a whiff of power they’ll sacrifice every principle they ever held. And those of us who remain dissidents will be demonized, or more likely ridiculed.’

  By the time I pulled up outside her house, she was looking sullen and beaten, the first time I’d ever seen her that way. ‘I can’t stand for this,’ she announced. ‘I just won’t.’ And then she got out of the car.

  A few months later, in the early summer of 1987, Margaret Thatcher won her third successive general election. The following day Iris resigned her lectureship. She also stopped attending political meetings. Neither university nor the picket lines held any of the allure that had kept her going. Falling back on a modest bequest that she had received when she was in her late teens from a sweet old man, a hereditary peer who loved to scandalize polite society by referring to himself as the queen of queers, she had the luxury of being able to drop out. ‘For some reason, he saw me as a muse he had to provide for, god bless him.’ Oddly, her explanation seemed to make perfect sense and I made no further enquiries.