As Yanis Varoufakis says in this TED talk, the modern democracies artificially separate the economic from the political spheres and pay a terrible price for it. (See also Karl Polanyi on that.) If Varoufakis’s name sounds familiar but you can’t remember why, he was the Greek Minister of Finance for seven months last year, for Syriza, when Greece was negotiating the terms of its debt with the so-called troika. He resigned right before his boss, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, acquiesced. The title of the talk is “Capitalism will eat democracy — unless we speak up.” True.

I often describe Democratism as an effort to extend the reach of democracy beyond the competencies of government, to address the full range of social resource allocation. Democratism isn’t anti-capitalist; it simply puts markets to work for the people.

Varoufakis’s solution, which he calls “simultaneously libertarian, Marxist and Keynesian,” is something different. It’s conventionally Marxist, in that it would end wage labor and any distinction between owners and workers. Its Keynesian aspect is the most interesting, involving the creation of a global digital currency (“cosmos,” he suggests calling them), coexisting with free-floating national currencies, as well as an international taxation system of nations, whose revenue could be used to address global challenges, such as climate change. That isn’t what you normally think of as Keynesian, although he attributes the idea to Keynes and one of its goals is to address aggregate demand shortfalls. (Keynes proposed an international currency he would have called the bancor in 1944 at Bretton Woods.) What’s libertarian about Varoufakis’s proposal I really don’t get. He says “it prioritizes empowered individuals,” but I’m not sure how, unless it’s simply by making them richer. I’m not clear how else it increases democracy, either, unless it’s by the global taxation system (which he doesn’t say is to be operated democratically).

So I’m not endorsing (or opposing) his proposal, but it’s a thoughtful attempt to grapple with roughly the same problem we’re working on over here. And it’s no less utopian, so thumbs up on that, too.

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