We discuss Western hegemony and U.S. policy in Russia, Ukraine and China with Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, whose new article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.” Sachs says the bipartisan U.S. approach to foreign policy is “unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded,” and warns the U.S. is creating “a recipe for yet another war” in East Asia.
AMY GOODMAN:Politico is reporting the Biden administration is preparing to ask Congress to approve a new $1.1 billion arms sale to Taiwan. The package reportedly includes 60 anti-ship missiles, 100 air-to-air missiles. This comes after two U.S. warships sailed through the Taiwan Strait Sunday for the first time since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan earlier this month. China condemned the visit and launched major military drills near Taiwan.
Meanwhile, President Biden announced $3 billion in more military aid for Ukraine last week, including money for missiles, artillery rounds and drones to help Ukrainian forces fight Russia.
We begin today’s show looking at U.S. policy on Russia and China. We’re joined by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He’s president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. His latest article is headlined “The West’s False Narrative About Russia and China.”
He begins the article by writing, quote, “The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous,” Jeffrey Sachs writes.
Jeffrey Sachs, welcome to Democracy Now! Why don’t you take it from there?
JEFFREY SACHS: Thank you. Good to be with you.
AMY GOODMAN: What is the story that people in the West and around the world should understand about what’s happening right now with these conflicts, with Russia, with Russia and Ukraine, and with China?
JEFFREY SACHS: The main point, Amy, is that we are not using diplomacy; we are using weaponry. This sale now announced to Taiwan that you’ve been discussing this morning is just another case in point. This does not make Taiwan safer. This does not make the world safer. It certainly doesn’t make the United States safer.
This goes back a long way. I think it’s useful to start 30 years ago. The Soviet Union ended, and some American leaders got it into their head that there was now what they called the unipolar world, that the U.S. was the sole superpower, and we could run the show. The results have been disastrous. We have had now three decades of militarization of American foreign policy. A new database that Tufts is maintaining has just shown that there have been more than 100 military interventions by the United States since 1991. It’s really unbelievable.
And I have seen, in my own experience over the last 30 years working extensively in Russia, in Central Europe, in China and in other parts of the world, how the U.S. approach is a military-first, and often a military-only, approach. We arm who we want. We call for NATO enlargement, no matter what other countries say may be harmful to their security interests. We brush aside anyone else’s security interests. And when they complain, we ship more armaments to our allies in that region. We go to war when we want, where we want, whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq or the covert war against Assad in Syria, which is even today not properly understood by the American people, or the war in Libya. And we say, “We’re peace-loving. What’s wrong with Russia and China? They are so warlike. They’re out to undermine the world.” And we end up in terrible confrontations.
The war in Ukraine — just to finish the introductory view — could have been avoided and should have been avoided through diplomacy. What President Putin of Russia was saying for years was “Do not expand NATO into the Black Sea, not to Ukraine, much less to Georgia,” which if people look on the map, straight across to the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Russia said, “This will surround us. This will jeopardize our security. Let us have diplomacy.” The United States rejected all diplomacy. I tried to contact the White House at the end of 2021 — in fact, I did contact the White House and said there will be war unless the U.S. enters diplomatic talks with President Putin over this question of NATO enlargement. I was told the U.S. will never do that. That is off the table. And it was off the table. Now we have a war that’s extraordinarily dangerous.
And we are taking exactly the same tactics in East Asia that led to the war in Ukraine. We’re organizing alliances, building up weaponry, trash-talking China, having Speaker Pelosi fly to Taiwan, when the Chinese government said, “Please, lower the temperature, lower the tensions.” We say, “No, we do what we want,” and now send more arms. This is a recipe for yet another war. And to my mind, it’s terrifying.
We are at the 60th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis, which I’ve studied all my life and I’ve written about, have written a book about the aftermath. We are driving to the precipice, and we are filled with our enthusiasm as we do so. And it’s just unaccountably dangerous and wrongheaded, the whole approach of U.S. foreign policy. And it’s bipartisan.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Jeffrey Sachs, I wanted to ask you — one of the things that you mentioned in a recent article that was published in Consortium News was this insistence of the United States, dragging Europe along, as well, in maintaining hegemony throughout the world at a time when the economic power of the West is declining. You mention, for instance, that the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — represent more than 40% of the world population and have a greater GDP than the G7 nations, yet their interests and their concerns are pretty much dismissed or, in the case, obviously, of Russia and China, portrayed to the American people as the aggressors, as the authoritarians, as the ones that are creating turmoil in the world.
JEFFREY SACHS: Your point is —
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I’m wondering if you could expand on that.
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, absolutely, and directing us to that is extremely important. The disproportionate power of the Western world, and especially the Anglo-Saxon world, which started with the British Empire, and now the United States, is about 250 years old, so a short period in world history. It happened, for a lot of very interesting reasons, that the Industrial Revolution came to England first. The steam engine was invented there. That’s probably the single most important invention of modern history. Britain became militarily dominant in the 19th century, like the United States was in the second half of the 20th century. Britain ran the show. Britain had the empire on which the sun never set. And the West, meaning the United States and Western Europe, now meaning the U.S. and the European Union, the U.K., Canada, Japan — in other words, the G7, the European Union together — is a small part of the world population, perhaps now roughly 10%, a little bit more, maybe 12.5% if you add in Japan to Western Europe and the U.S. But the mindset is “We run the world.” And that was the way it was for 200 years in this Industrial Age.
But times have changed. And really, since the 1950s, the rest of the world, when it gained independence from European imperialism, started to educate its populations, started to adopt and adapt and innovate technologies. And lo and behold, a small sliver of the world really didn’t run the world or didn’t have a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or science or technology. And this is wonderful. The knowledge and possibility of decent lives is spreading throughout the whole world.
But in the United States, there is a resentment to this, a deep resentment. I think there’s also a tremendous historical ignorance, because I think a lot of U.S. leaders have no clue as to modern history. But they resent China’s rise. That is an affront to the United States. How dare China rise! This is our world! This is our century! And so, starting around 2014, I saw, step by step — I watched it with intense detail, because it’s my daily activity — how the United States recast China not as a country that was recovering from a century and a half of great difficulty, but rather as an enemy. And we consciously, as a matter of American foreign policy, started to say, “We need to contain China. China’s rise is no longer in our interest,” as if the United States is to determine whether China is prosperous or not. The Chinese are not naive; in fact, they’re extraordinarily sophisticated. They watched all of this exactly the same way that I did. I know the authors of the U.S. texts. They are my colleagues, at Harvard or other places. I was shocked when this kind of containment idea started to be applied.
But the basic point is, the West has led the world for a brief period, 250 years, but feel, “That’s our right. This is a Western world. We are the G7. We get to determine who writes the rules of the game.” Indeed, Obama, you know, a good guy on the spectrum of what we have in foreign policy, said, “Let’s write the rules of trade for Asia, but not have China write any of those rules. The U.S. will write the rules.” This is an incredibly naive and dangerous and outmoded way to understand the world. We in the United States are 4.2% of the world’s population. We do not run the world. We are not world leader. We are a country of 4.2% of the people in a big, diverse world, and we should learn to get along, play in the sandbox peacefully, not demand that we have all the toys in the sandbox. And we’re not over that thinking yet. And unfortunately, it’s both political parties. It’s what motivates Speaker Pelosi to go to Taiwan in the middle of all of this, as if she really had to go to stir up the tensions. But it’s the mindset that the U.S. is in charge.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to go back a little bit to — back into the 1990s. You recall, I’m sure, the enormous financial collapse that occurred in Mexico in the 1990s, where the Clinton administration authorized $50 billion in a bailout to Mexico, which was really to Wall Street investors. At the time, you were advising the post-Soviet Russian government, which also had a financial — had deep financial problems at the time but was unable to get any significant Western assistance, even from the International Monetary Fund. And you were critical of that at the time. I’m wondering if you could talk about the differences how the U.S. responded to the Mexico crisis versus the Russian financial crisis, and what the roots of that may have been in what the current situation is in Russia today.
JEFFREY SACHS: Absolutely. And I had a controlled experiment, because I was economic adviser both to Poland and to the Soviet Union in the last year of President Gorbachev and to President Yeltsin in the first two years of Russian independence, 1992, ’93. My job was finance, to actually help Russia find a way to address, as you described it, a massive financial crisis. And my basic recommendation in Poland, and then in Soviet Union and in Russia, was: To avoid a societal crisis and a geopolitical crisis, the rich Western world should help to tamp down this extraordinary financial crisis that was taking place with the breakdown of the former Soviet Union.
Well, interestingly, in the case of Poland, I made a series of very specific recommendations, and they were all accepted by the U.S. government — creating a stabilization fund, canceling part of Poland’s debts, allowing many financial maneuvers to get Poland out of the difficulty. And, you know, I patted myself on the back. “Oh, look at this!” I make a recommendation, and one of them, for a billion dollars, stabilization fund, was accepted within eight hours by the White House. So, I thought, “Pretty good.”
Then came the analogous appeal on behalf of, first, Gorbachev, in the final days, and then President Yeltsin. Everything I recommended, which was on the same basis of economic dynamics, was rejected flat out by the White House. I didn’t understand it, I have to tell you, at the time. I said, “But it worked in Poland.” And they’d stare at me blankly. In fact, an acting secretary of state in 1992 said, “Professor Sachs, it doesn’t even matter whether I agree with you or not. It’s not going to happen.”
And it took me, actually, quite a while to understand the underlying geopolitics. Those were exactly the days of Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and what became the Project for the New American Century, meaning for the continuation of American hegemony. I didn’t see it at the moment, because I was thinking as an economist, how to help overcome a financial crisis. But the unipolar politics was taking shape, and it was devastating. Of course, it left Russia in a massive financial crisis that led to a lot of instability that had its own implications for years to come.
But even more than that, what these people were planning, early on, despite explicit promises to Gorbachev and Yeltsin, was the expansion of NATO. And Clinton started the expansion of NATO with the three countries of Central Europe — Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic — and then George W. Bush Jr. added seven countries — Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the three Baltic states — but right up against Russia. And then, in 2008, the coup de grâce, which was the U.S. insistence, over the private opposition of the European leaders — and European leaders talked to me privately about it at the time. But in 2008, Bush said NATO will expand to Ukraine and to Georgia. And again, if you take out a map and look at the Black Sea, the explicit goal was to surround Russia in the Black Sea. By the way, it’s an old playbook. It’s the same playbook as Palmerston in 1853 to 1856 in the first Crimean War: surround Russia in the Black Sea, cut off its ability to have a military presence and to project any kind of influence into the eastern Mediterranean. Brzezinski himself said in 1997 that Ukraine would be the geographic pivot for Eurasia.
So, what these neocons were doing in the early 1990s was building the U.S. unipolar world. And they were already contemplating lots of wars in order to take out the former Soviet-allied countries — wars to overthrow Saddam, wars to overthrow Assad, wars to overthrow Gaddafi. Those were all rolled out in the next 20 years. They’ve been a complete disaster, debacle for those countries, horrible for the United States, trillions of dollars wasted. But it was a plan. And that neoconservative plan is in its heyday right now on two fronts: in the Ukraine front and on the Taiwan Strait front. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous, what these people are doing to American foreign policy, which hardly is, you know, a policy of democracy. It’s a policy of a small group that has the idea that a unipolar world and U.S. hegemony is the way that we need to go.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Sachs, we don’t have much time, but since this was such a big issue — Naomi Klein took you on big time with The Shock Doctrine, talking about you recommending shock therapy. Can you draw a line between what happened as the Russian economy unraveled to the conditions leading up to the Ukraine invasion? I mean, how did the economic catastrophe that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union lead to the rise of the oligarchic class and, indeed, the presidency of Vladimir Putin?
JEFFREY SACHS: Yeah, I’ve tried to explain to Naomi, whom I admire a great deal, for years that what I was recommending was financial help to — whether it was Poland or to the Soviet Union or to Russia. I was absolutely aghast at the cheating and the corruption and the giveaways. And I said so very explicitly at the time and resigned over it, both because I was useless in trying to get Western help and also because I did not like at all what was going on.
And I would say that the failure of an orderly approach, which was achieved in Poland but failed in the former Soviet Union because there was no Western constructive engagement, definitely played a role in the instability in the 1990s, definitely played a role in the rise of the oligarch class. In fact, I was absolutely explaining to the U.S. and to the IMF and the World Bank in 1994, ’95, what was going on. They didn’t care, because they thought, “Well, that’s OK. That’s for Yeltsin, perhaps,” all of that cheating in the shares-for-loans process. Having said all of that, it was a —
AMY GOODMAN: We have less than a minute.
JEFFREY SACHS: OK. Having said all of that, I think what is important to say is that there is no linear determinism, even from events like that, which were destabilizing and very unhappy and unnecessary, to what is happening now, because when President Putin came in, he was not anti-European, he was not anti-American. What he saw, though, was the incredible arrogance of the United States, the expansion of NATO, the wars in Iraq, the covert war in Syria, the war in Libya, against the U.N. resolution. So, we created so much of what we’re facing right now through our own ineptitude and arrogance. There was no linear determination. It was step-by-step U.S. arrogance that has helped to bring us to where we are today.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeffrey Sachs, economist and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, president of the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network, has served as adviser to three U.N. secretaries-general. I want to thank you so much for being with us, joining us from Austria, where he’s attending a conference.
Coming up, we will look at — we will talk to a reporter who’s documented how, over the last year, the U.S. has approved just 123 Afghan humanitarian parole applications. Compare that to 68,000 approved applications from Ukrainians in recent months. Stay with us.
photo Shirin Neshat
An anonymous collective unfurled banners proclaiming “Women, Life, Freedom” from the top of the institution’s rotunda
A group of Iranian artists, frustrated with the inaction of Western museums in the face of human rights abuses in Iran, unfurled a series of banners covered with the face of Mahsa Amini at the Guggenheim Museum in New York on 22 October.
Amini died in an Iranian hospital last month after being detained by the regime’s morality police for allegedly not complying with the country’s hijab regulations. Her death sparked ongoing mass protests in Tehran and cities across Iran.
The anonymous collective unravelled the banners, which also proclaimed, “Women, Life, Freedom” from the top floor of the museum’s recognisable rotunda. Speaking to The Art Newspaper, Shiva Balaghi—a Middle East scholar at the University of California Santa Barbara—says that the “anonymous collective action is in keeping with the protest movements happening across Iran now”. This weekend, around 80,000 supporters marched in Berlin in solidarity with the Iranian demonstrations.
In a post on Instagram, the Iran-born artist Shirin Neshat posted a film of the action at the Guggenheim, saying: “Masha [sic] Amini emerged at the Guggenheim museum today!! Proud of a few brave Iranian artists [making] a surprise protest by hanging this beautiful display today, they are the conscience of the sleepy art world who cares little for Iranian women fighting for basic human rights and freedom.” It is unclear how the images were sourced.
A statement issued by the anonymous artists collective says: “This homage is a collective call for action to support the revolution in Iran, led by brave Iranian women risking their lives to overthrow a brutal dictatorship in a fight for freedom, democracy, and women rights.”
The London-based artist and collector Maryam Eisler subsequently responded: “’Sleepy‘ is an understatement. It’s a disgrace. Good on these creative souls to bring their plight into the heart of the art house even if this ‘house’ hasn’t stood up for them yet.” The Guggenheim Museum was contacted for comment; in 2015, the institution held the first US museum exhibition of mirror works and drawings by the late Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian.
Earlier this month Eisler was among a number of art world figures who said that museums in the UK and US must do more to address the worsening human rights situation in Iran.
The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts.
Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine.
The world is on the edge of nuclear catastrophe in no small part because of the failure of Western political leaders to be forthright about the causes of the escalating global conflicts. The relentless Western narrative that the West is noble while Russia and China are evil is simple-minded and extraordinarily dangerous. It is an attempt to manipulate public opinion, not to deal with very real and pressing diplomacy.
The essential narrative of the West is built into US national security strategy. The core US idea is that China and Russia are implacable foes that are “attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” These countries are, according to the US, “determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
The irony is that since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria, and Yemen just to name a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union. The US has military bases in 85 countries, China in 3, and Russia in 1 (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.
President Joe Biden has promoted this narrative, declaring that the greatest challenge of our time is the competition with the autocracies, which “seek to advance their own power, export and expand their influence around the world, and justify their repressive policies and practices as a more efficient way to address today’s challenges.” US security strategy is not the work of any single US president but of the US security establishment, which is largely autonomous, and operates behind a wall of secrecy.
The overwrought fear of China and Russia is sold to a Western public through manipulation of the facts. A generation earlier George W. Bush, Jr. sold the public on the idea that America’s greatest threat was Islamic fundamentalism, without mentioning that it was the CIA, with Saudi Arabia and other countries, that had created, funded, and deployed the jihadists in Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere to fight America’s wars.
Or consider the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, which was painted in the Western media as an act of unprovoked perfidy. Years later, we learned that the Soviet invasion was actually preceded by a CIA operation designed to provoke the Soviet invasion! The same misinformation occurred vis-à-vis Syria. The Western press is filled with recriminations against Putin’s military assistance to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad beginning in 2015, without mentioning that the US supported the overthrow of al-Assad beginning in 2011, with the CIA funding a major operation (Timber Sycamore) to overthrow Assad years before Russia arrived.
Or more recently, when US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recklessly flew to Taiwan despite China’s warnings, no G7 foreign minister criticized Pelosi’s provocation, yet the G7 ministers together harshly criticized China’s “overreaction” to Pelosi’s trip.
The Western narrative about the Ukraine war is that it is an unprovoked attack by Putin in the quest to recreate the Russian empire. Yet the real history starts with the Western promise to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not enlarge to the East, followed by four waves of NATO aggrandizement: in 1999, incorporating three Central European countries; in 2004, incorporating 7 more, including in the Black Sea and Baltic States; in 2008, committing to enlarge to Ukraine and Georgia; and in 2022, inviting four Asia-Pacific leaders to NATO to take aim at China.
Nor do the Western media mention the US role in the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych; the failure of the Governments of France and Germany, guarantors of the Minsk II agreement, to press Ukraine to carry out its commitments; the vast US armaments sent to Ukraine during the Trump and Biden Administrations in the lead-up to war; nor the refusal of the US to negotiate with Putin over NATO enlargement to Ukraine.
Of course, NATO says that is purely defensive, so that Putin should have nothing to fear. In other words, Putin should take no notice of the CIA operations in Afghanistan and Syria; the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999; the NATO overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in 2011; the NATO occupation of Afghanistan for 15 years; nor Biden’s “gaffe” calling for Putin’s ouster (which of course was no gaffe at all); nor US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stating that the US war aim in Ukraine is the weakening of Russia.
At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.
There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.
Above all, at this time of extreme danger, European leaders should pursue the true source of European security: not US hegemony, but European security arrangements that respect the legitimate security interests of all European nations, certainly including Ukraine, but also including Russia, which continues to resist NATO enlargements into the Black Sea. Europe should reflect on the fact that the non-enlargement of NATO and the implementation of the Minsk II agreements would have averted this awful war in Ukraine. At this stage, diplomacy, not military escalation, is the true path to European and global security.
Today’s fraught situation can easily spin out of control, as the world has done on so many past occasions—yet this time with the possibility of nuclear catastrophe.
Former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski famously described Ukraine as a “geopolitical pivot” of Eurasia, central to both US and Russian power. Since Russia views its vital security interests to be at stake in the current conflict, the war in Ukraine is rapidly escalating to a nuclear showdown. It’s urgent for both the US and Russia to exercise restraint before disaster hits.
Since the middle of the 19th Century, the West has competed with Russia over Crimea and more specifically, naval power in the Black Sea. In the Crimean War (1853-6), Britain and France captured Sevastopol and temporarily banished Russia’s navy from the Black Sea. The current conflict is, in essence, the Second Crimean War. This time, a US-led military alliance seeks to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, so that five NATO members would encircle the Black Sea.
The US has long regarded any encroachment by great powers in the Western Hemisphere as a direct threat to US security, dating back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which states: “We owe it, therefore, to candor and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those [European] powers to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.”
In 1961, the US invaded Cuba when Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro looked to the Soviet Union for support. The US was not much interested in Cuba’s “right” to align with whichever country it wanted – the claim the US asserts regarding Ukraine’s supposed right to join NATO. The failed US invasion in 1961 led to the Soviet Union’s decision to place offensive nuclear weapons in Cuba in 1962, which in turn led to the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly 60 years ago this month. That crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war.
Yet America’s regard for its own security interests in the Americas has not stopped it from encroaching on Russia’s core security interests in Russia’s neighborhood. As the Soviet Union weakened, US policy leaders came to believe that the US military could operate as it pleases. In 1991, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained to General Wesley Clark that the US can deploy its military force in the Middle East “and the Soviet Union won’t stop us.” America’s national security officials decided to overthrow Middle East regimes allied to the Soviet Union, and to encroach on Russia’s security interests.
In 1990, Germany and the US gave assurances to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could disband its own military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, without fear that NATO would enlarge eastward to replace the Soviet Union. It won Gorbachev’s assent to German reunification in 1990 on this basis. Yet with the Soviet Union’s demise, President Bill Clinton reneged by supporting the eastward expansion of NATO.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin protested vociferously but could do nothing to stop it. America’s dean of statecraft with Russia, George Kennan, declared that NATO expansion “is the beginning of a new cold war.”
Under Clinton’s watch, NATO expanded to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. Five years later, under President George W. Bush, Jr. NATO expanded to seven more countries: the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania), the Black Sea (Bulgaria and Romania), the Balkans (Slovenia), and Slovakia. Under President Barack Obama, NATO expanded to Albania and Croatia in 2009, and under President Donald Trump, to Montenegro in 2019.
Russia’s opposition to NATO enlargement intensified sharply in 1999 when NATO countries disregarded the UN and attacked Russia’s ally Serbia, and stiffened further in the 2000’s with the US wars of choice in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. At the Munich Security conference in 2007, President Putin declared that NATO enlargement represents a “serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”
Putin continued: “And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances [of no NATO enlargement] our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?” Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them. But I will allow myself to remind this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990. He said at the time that: “the fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee. Where are these guarantees?”
Also in 2007, with the NATO admission of two Black Sea countries, Bulgaria and Romania, the US established the Black Sea Area Task Group (originally the Task Force East). Then in 2008, the US raised the US-Russia tensions still further by declaring that NATO would expand to the very heart of the Black Sea, by incorporating Ukraine and Georgia, threatening Russia’s naval access to the Black Sea, Mediterranean, and Middle East. With Ukraine’s and Georgia’s entry, Russia would be surrounded by five NATO countries in the Black Sea: Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Turkey, and Ukraine.
Russia was initially protected from NATO enlargement to Ukraine by Ukraine’s pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, who led the Ukrainian parliament to declare Ukraine’s neutrality in 2010. Yet in 2014, the US helped to overthrow Yanukovych and bring to power a staunchly anti-Russian government. The Ukraine War broke out at that point, with Russia quickly reclaiming Crimea and supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Donbas, the region of Eastern Ukraine with a relatively high proportion of Russian population. Ukraine’s parliament formally abandoned neutrality later in 2014.
Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the Donbas have been fighting a brutal war for 8 years. Attempts to end the war in the Donbas through the Minsk Agreements failed when Ukraine’s leaders decided not to honor the agreements, which called for autonomy for the Donbas. After 2014, the US poured in massive armaments to Ukraine and helped to restructure Ukraine’s military to be interoperable with NATO, as evidenced in this year’s fighting.
The Russian invasion in 2022 would likely have been averted had Biden agreed with Putin’s demand at the end of 2021 to end NATO’s eastward enlargement. The war would likely have been ended in March 2022, when the governments of Ukraine and Russia exchanged a draft peace agreement based on Ukrainian neutrality. Behind the scenes, the US and UK pushed Zelensky to reject any agreement with Putin and to fight on. At that point, Ukraine walked away from the negotiations.
Russia will escalate as necessary, possibly to nuclear weapons, to avoid military defeat and NATO’s further eastward enlargement. The nuclear threat is not empty, but a measure of the Russian leadership’s perception of its security interests at stake. Terrifyingly, the US was also prepared to use nuclear weapons in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a senior Ukrainian official recently urged the US to launch nuclear strikes “as soon as Russia even thinks of carrying out nuclear strikes,” surely a recipe for World War III. We are again on the brink of nuclear catastrophe.
President John F. Kennedy learned about nuclear confrontation during the Cuban missile crisis. He defused that crisis not by force of will or US military might, but by diplomacy and compromise, removing US nuclear missiles in Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing its nuclear missiles in Cuba. The following year, he pursued peace with the Soviet Union, signing the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
In June 1963, Kennedy uttered the essential truth that can keep us alive today: “Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO. Today’s fraught situation can easily spin out of control, as the world has done on so many past occasions – yet this time with the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.
Noam Chomsky was right: humanity could, in principle, avert climate catastrophe with a permanent investment (I would say 5% of global GDP, rather than Noam’s 2% to 3%) that is financially feasible within the current global system of financialised capital. His critics also had a point: the political will necessary for such a Global New Deal to be enacted is impossible to find within the confines of the current political economy. Interesting as this debate most certainly is, it is now moot. The New Cold War, started by Trump and turbocharged by Biden, its extension in the context of the Ukrainian War, and the new Vortex of Financial Instability caused by the transition from the Great Deflation to the Great Inflation – these developments have rendered a Global Green New Deal utterly beyond the limits of feasibility. Rosa Luxembourg’s pressing question (Socialism or Barbarism?) is now acquiring a new meaning as it becomes: Socialism or Extinction? (Yanis Varoufakis on the first part of the debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism”)
Editorial note
The following commentary was written by Marxist economist, politician and former Finance Minister of Greece Yanis Varoufakis on the first part of the debate “Ecological Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the renowned American intellectual Noam Chomsky, the Chilean exponent of the new ideology of Collapsist Marxism Miguel Fuentes and climate scientist Guy McPherson. One of the main characteristics of Varoufakis’ comment (who describes himself as a “Libertarian Marxist”) is offering a balanced review of some of the main ideas expressed earlier in this debate. The latter from the perspective of the implications of current geopolitical events such as the Russo-Ukrainian war and what Vafourakis has defined as the beginning of a new Cold War. Varoufakis commentary thus constitutes both a necessary update and an informed closure of the first part of this ongoing discussion.
Have we, humans, passed the point of no return down the path to ecological ruin? Does ruin-without-end loom black across the land, the air, the oceans? I hope not but, regardless, I don’t think it matters. What matters is what we do. And how we do it. From now on. Until our last breath.
Sure enough, three centuries of industrialisation dictated by the logic of capital pushed us into a hideous predicament: Whatever we do from now on may, I acknowledge, prove insufficient for preventing the collapse of organised human society. Even so, radical humanists ought to think it necessary to do our best to resist civilisational collapse. As an old-school Marxist once taught me, what is necessary is never unwise, never futile, never worthless – even if it is as hard to accomplish as hitting a bullet with another bullet fired from a handgun while riding a runaway horse.
I am no climate scientist, so I shall say nothing about our proximity to the point of no return. Instead, I shall focus on the political economy of what it means to do our best in view of our capacities and in the face of ecological and civilisational collapse. My focus shall be on what we can do, as activists, to help translate humanity’s remaining capacities into the necessary praxes, into the collective actions that will permit us jointly to say: “We did our damned best!”.
The final Battle
Two are our greatest obstacles: Baseless optimism is one. And self-indulgent pessimism is the other. In fact, I would go so far as to proscribe prognosis altogether. Prediction is not our friend. We know everything we need to know in order to act: humanity is on a path to ruin without any guarantee that we can turn back. That’s enough knowledge. Unlike astronomers seeking to predict the trajectory of a faraway comet, our current task is not, and should never be, to predict the trajectory of climate change. Astronomers have the luxury of knowing that the phenomenon they study (the comet) doesn’t give a damn about their predictions of its trajectory. We don’t have this luxury. Our predictions, to the extent that enough people take them seriously, are crucial determinants of what people do. Thus, the phenomenon we are struggling to fathom and control (e.g., humanity-driven climate change) cares deeply about our predictions and, in an infinite regress, is bound violently to react to them – rendering our predictions useless and, potentially, causing us to lose any control over the phenomenon we might have had.
What should our task be, once forecasting is out? My answer is: To end the legalised robbery of people and Earth fuelling climate catastrophe and the broader ecocide. Even if it is too late, at least let’s go out with a revolutionary bang. Let the last feeling we have be that we did what we could, albeit belatedly. To accomplish this, we must inspire the multitudes to join our rebellion. But to inspire them, we need to articulate a Program that addresses people’s hearts and minds. What should that Program consist of? This is the pressing question.
What should our task be, once forecasting is out? My answer is: To end the legalised robbery of people and Earth fuelling climate catastrophe and the broader ecocide. Even if it is too late, at least let’s go out with a revolutionary bang. Let the last feeling we have be that we did what we could, albeit belatedly. To accomplish this, we must inspire the multitudes to join our rebellion. But to inspire them, we need to articulate a Program that addresses people’s hearts and minds. What should that Program consist of? This is the pressing question.
In the face of the collapse of civilization: the need for a new Revolutionary Program
Our Program should avoid excessive optimism and the insinuation that climate change is a technical problem calling for a technical fix. Smart technological solutions funded by clever public finance will not save the Earth just because they are feasible (even if they are!). Equally, it would be a terrible defeat for progressives to dismiss the capacity of science, technology and public finance to be part of a Program that succeeds in saving humanity and the planet. Giving up on humanity and its collective ingenuity may be tempting in times like the present, when war is once more turbocharging the fossil fuel industry. Alas, such defeatism is impermissible for progressives. This, our darkest hour, is precisely the time when we, progressives, radicals and revolutionaries, must give back rational hope to those who have been deprived of it.
Which brings me to the debate between, on the one hand, Noam Chomsky and, on the other, Miguel Fuentes and Guy McPherson[1]. As ever, when it comes to passionate debates between radicals whose objectives coincide but who disagree regarding strategy and constraints, it is important to take a step back so as to appreciate the room for synthesis. In the following paragraphs, I shall attempt such a dialectical synthesis for one purpose: to establish the common ground that is a prerequisite for a common Program that inspires the multitudes to coalesce internationally so as to end the legalised robbery of people and Earth.
Let me begin with Noam’s position, which I understand intimately having myself been a proponent of a Green New Deal since 2001. A large public investment in humanity’s green transition (Noam suggested 2%-3% of global GDP, I raise this to at least 5%) can make a decisive dent in our collective carbon footprint. Public financial instruments can be constructed to mobilise these funds globally. Exponential technological advancements in solar, wind, green hydrogen, organic agriculture, etc. are feasible. Technically (both in terms of engineering and public finance), an effective green transition is possible without a revolution, under the present global exploitative system. However, the operative word here is: Technically.
Politically, I cannot see how the current oligarchy-without-frontiers will allow the green transition to happen. Green Keynesianism will not work for the reasons Michal Kalecki gave decades ago to explain why the original Keynesianism would never be allowed to run its course. In short, because even if the bourgeoisie panics and adopts Keynesian (today Green Keynesian) policies to save its skin, the very moment these policies begin to bear fruit, and well before they do their job, the ruling classes will abandon them in favour of their usual extractive, austerity-driven policies. It is in the capitalist class’s nature to block the very road that leads to its own salvation.
So, why do people like Noam Chomsky and myself still put forward Green New Deals or Green Keynesian-like policy proposals? Are we so naïve as to imagine that our sensible arguments will win over the capitalist oligarchy? I assure you dear reader that we have no such illusions. No, the reason we do it is because their mere advocacy is full of revolutionary potential. Let me explain this by comparing three different strategies of how to approach the many who are impervious to the language of us radical leftists – with a view to mobilising them. Compare and contrast three things we could say to them:
Strategy 1: “Nothing will save humanity except revolutionary socioecological changes that include (A) the socialisation of property rights over the means of production and (B) painful decisions on how to de-grow our economy in favour of Nature and of our cultural and spiritual lives. Join us!”
Strategy 2: “Humanity is doomed. We are past the point of no return. The collapse of our ‘civilisation’ is inevitable. Let’s embrace collapse and see how best to organise whatever life survives within the ruins.”
Strategy 3: “Here is a bunch of policies that can be implemented today, even under the existing system, to shift massive funds to the green transition, to provide basic public goods to everyone, especially in the Global South, to eradicate unpayable debts, to pay you a basic income wherever you live on the planet etc.”
The need for a Green New Deal?
Strategy 1 involves telling people out there the naked truth about the need for a revolution which they, nevertheless, are unprepared psychologically to fathom, let alone to stage. Indeed, Strategy 1 will cause anyone who is not already a card-carrying revolutionary to yawn and move on, with their heads tilted to the floor, unable to muster any enthusiasm for joining us to rebel against the systematic looting of people and planet. Similarly with Strategy 2, which will probably only benefit psychoanalysts whose clientele will burgeon, not to mention end-of-the-world prophets of doom whose congregations will grow. Only Strategy 3 stands a chance of mobilising those whom we, the radical left, have failed to mobilise. Here is why.
If the policies of our Green New Deal make sense in the mind of reasonable people who are discontented with the grim social and ecological realities surrounding them (yet who are no revolutionaries), it should be possible to convince them that these policies, technically, can be implemented immediately. Without a revolution. Within the current system (like, for example, Roosevelt’s neutering of the banking sector did not require a prior overthrowing of capitalism). Once this realisation is planted in people’s heads, it is plausible that a radical question will hit them: “If these things could be done today to benefit humanity, without some socio-ecological revolution, why on earth are the authorities not doing them?” It is at that point that the ears and minds of the many will be readied for the explanation which only radicals can offer them: That, yes, though technically feasible, these policies are ignored by an establishment solely interested in profit that is maximised by methods that destroy lives, ecosystems, capitalism’s own sustainability even. That will be the point when we, radicals, will get our chance to influence the many, to radicalise them.
As I was reading Miguel Fuentes’s and Guy McPherson’s rejoinders to Noam Chomsky, I was struck and concerned by their embrace of defeat. Sure enough, I understand their radical rejection of baseless optimism and of those who treat ecological disaster as a technical problem. On the other hand, it seems to me that if civilisational collapse is the answer, we are asking the wrong question. That if the Left must fall back onto a neo-Malthusianism, which places its hope on death as the only possible cure to the plague that is humanity, we have lost our way. We, the Left, were defeated at a planetary scale in 1991, and since then we have been failing to recover, despite the occasional revolutionary moments that revived our spirits temporarily. But, vengeance and defeatism are lazy forms of grief. Giving up on humanity because humanity gave up on us, on the Left, is an affront to the values the left was born to serve.
Wishful thinking, of a Keynesian or social democratic kind, is not the answer either. Without a socio-ecological revolution humanity is doomed. Green Keynesianism will never be implemented to any degree equal to the task. As for the green technologies developed under capitalism, which could make a difference (e.g., green hydrogen), they will never be developed fully by a system which has a natural propensity to continue cannibalising what remains of our commons. The delicious irony is that for a fully-fledged Green New Deal to be implemented a revolution must precede it. And there’s the rub: For a revolution to precede any Green New Deal, we need rational rage to overcome the hearts and minds of people who are not yet revolutionaries. To engender this rational rage, the many need to be exposed to our Green New Deal policy proposals, to be convinced by them before watching the establishment shoot these proposals down.
Then and only then might the rational rage that is necessary to motivate them crawl up their spine, bolstering it enough to cause them to join us in rising up, en masse, against the incessant looting of people and Earth.
Almost a hundred years after Lukács’ essay History and Class Consciousness came about, western emancipatory movements find themselves in a much more fragile situation than back then, despite capitalist foundations being now severely eroded. This article examines the reasons why anti-capitalist forces remain paralyzed at the very same moment that social-objective conditions appear to be so favourable to anti-capitalist endeavours.
The constant surprise of the so-called political Left, when right-wing politicians, armed with anti-system discourse, win elections and gain vast popular support, speaks volumes about its own stance. Not only it is striking its incapacity to understand the ongoing tendencies of reality but also its incessant search for scapegoats. Thus, this political enterprise becomes part of a vicious circle, for the political Left bases itself on concepts, considered not only morally but also epistemologically superior. Insofar as the political Left considers being always right for carrying an abstract pure moral reason, then not only it can never learn from its mistakes but also reality itself appears wrong. Instead of trying to understand the real dynamic of current social processes, this political Left reasoning brands people’s leaning towards reactionary solutions simply as stupidity.
Not only must the anti-capitalist struggle relinquish being the custodian of (pure) concepts, which would allegedly qualify itself as the sole bearer of justice, but it must also understand two crucial aspects of the nature of concepts. First, concepts do not hold meaning in themselves, historical processes of social relations are in constant transformation, and, accordingly, the meaning of all concepts as well. Second, capitalism does not only appropriate wealth, nature, and labour, but not less important also discourse. Thus, when the political Left uses uncritically concepts of justice, democracy, human rights, and equality, it reinforces status quo values and by doing so delegitimates its own practice. Hegemonic power makes use of existing concepts and changes their meaning by attaining the hegemony of practices which embeds and gives real meaning to them.
This process has two dimensions: one historical, another theoretical, and, in reality, both are intimately intertwined.
Beginning with the historical process, not only in the western core but in the whole western sphere of influence the struggle against capital, namely the anti-capitalist struggle has endured many battles to finally be virtually obliterated during the post-World War II period. While the contemporary political Left deliberates about justice claims, namely struggles within the system, the capitalist elite knows today as it already knew before World War I, that the Marxism and Socialist-Communist movements represent the biggest threat to its hegemonic power. Thus, western elites, armed with their governments, and “intelligence” (spy) agencies, have been holding ground against their perceived threats. On the one hand, the Frankfurt School – claiming to be Marxism heirs – has declared the inexistence and anachronism of class struggle; on the other hand, the elite has been waging class war against Marxism intellectuals, the working class – western and beyond –, and most of the people in the global south, where most raw materials are to found, which are needed to enable the existence of western capitalist societies by the means of exploitation of nature and man. Human exploitation occurs first and foremost at the level of labour, which, in capitalism, has a particular mode of existence. Of course, society or a group or even an individual can be exploited by capitalism while being outside of the capitalist process of production. Even today, there are countless examples, for instance, many small farmers work as independent producers but their surplus is subjected to the capitalist logic of accumulation, production, distribution, consumption, and reproduction. Even if a capitalist industry improves its own efficiency, it does not have a direct positive effect on the small farmer’s production. This formal process of subsumption of labour still happens today and helps us understand the neocolonial capitalist relations between underdeveloped and developed nations. Understanding the conditions does not mean romanticizing agriculture, as most land redistribution struggles do, in opposite direction to what Lenin’s critical reflections have taught. This absolute form of surplus value is diluted into a more efficient and technical relation of exploitation, namely the extraction of relative surplus value, which occurs when and where capitalist relations advance and mature. It goes without saying, neither form exists in isolation as absolute forms, they help us understand the different moments with dominant relations, specific contexts, and historical dynamics, as their proportions vary depending on the many social conditions. It also facilitates the comprehension of how moments of crisis unfold, during which the extraction of absolute surplus value tends to increase, thus, working hours and the state of precarity intensify while labour benefits and rights slip away. This more brutal everyday life creates new objective and subjective pressures which can be compensated extra-economic elements (see below).
Today much is said about neoliberalism and, to some extent, postmodernism as well, nonetheless, these are not doctrines or schools of thought, but strategies of social-political control, deterrence, and hegemony. To understand them as lab experiments, namely as isolated phenomena, is to miscomprehend the historical process, which connects them among Keynesianism, vulgar Marxism, social democracy, existentialism, structuralism, irrationalism, critical theory, etc. Scholars have provided thoroughly and unequivocal research revealing the historical process, in which the elites co-opted western intelligentsia (thinkers, scholars, artists, etc.) and, accordingly, shaped a new cultural memory, novel social values, self-affirmative scientific endeavours, etc. These programs have been so successfully implemented that today, the political Left does not even recognise its existence, in other words, the subjectification of reality, where individual feeling, wants, and identities emerge at the centre of the intellectual social debate and stage, appear to be the result of an organic process/development of reason, which deemed the current subjective worldview based on identities morally and epistemologically superior to Marxist struggle against capitalist exploitation and control.
The political Left has become unknowingly the neoliberal Left, it atomises social problems, treating objective pivotal questions as subjective problems, achieving, consequently, a total relativization of objective reality.
This appears a cul-de-sac in itself. How can the neoliberal Left engage in critical thinking and action, when itself has become incapable of practising them? Today, it confounds the process of relativization and subjectification as critical attitudes, failing to recognize the shallowness of its moral criticism void of critical content. More than ever, the political Left, now the neoliberal Left, needs theory before it can act. However, its theorization has become an aprioristic denial of concrete reality, pure idealism fetishized and travestied in laden moral concepts, yet emptied of content. As Mao Tse-Tung taught, the first act of the critique must be self-critique. The critique before revealing the limits of contemporary social practice must therefore understand the limits of itself. All the exhaustively repeated concepts must be understood within their historical contexts and perspectives. By calling any adversary fascist, the neoliberal Left has voided the important historical concept of fascism from its meaning. Or, by pledging equality, the neoliberal Left does not distinguish between the communist equality of the generic human being and the bourgeois equalities of capitalist law and economy, which equalizes the whole of humanity throughout an ever-growing process of reification, namely people become things, commodities subjected to the capitalist laws of alienation (juridic), appropriation (political-economic), and trade (economic).
But the problem is still aggravated by the neoliberal Left’s repulse and demonisation of reality. As a result of capitalist elites’ plundering of whole nations with war, throwing millions of people into migration, producing everlasting exploitation of nature, and pushing millions of workers into precarization; the working class looking for some relief seeks shelter within the rolls of family, religion, and political promises. If a politician gets the neoliberal seal of approval of the neoliberal Left – such as Kirschner, Morales, Mujica, Boric, Lula da Silva, etc. –, then itself proclaims the end of history, namely an uncritical assessment of victory of justice against injustice. Or, if the religion embraced is the one of the Market as God, namely within the parameters of capitalist rule, then it declares itself laic and agnostic, thus the bearer of a higher truth of capitalist realism. And finally, if the family ensures the nurturing of identity politics, then, according to its judgement, this signals an evolution and commitment to a better, freer society. Yet, the neoliberal Left does not provide a critique of the capitalist system. If a politician presents himself as anti-systemic (either a party, such as German AfD, or a candidate, such as D. Trump), then the masses adhere to it, even if it only appears anti-systemic. If the religion chosen by the masses is not that of the Market as God, then it is, as Marx put it, the expression of real misery, the mind of mindless condition, thus, the need of religion expresses the need for this illusion; for religion is not an illusion in itself, it is what enables one to overlook the rotten of law, economy, politics. And finally, if the family appears as a bastion of hope, safety, and community, it is because the real social nexus is crumbling to such a degree that the smallest social circle, namely the family seems to provide the last unity for hope.
Outside of the selected circles of academics and the upper middle classes, exists the real struggle of most people: how to pay rent, put food on the table for their children, make ends meet to provide for electricity, clothing, warmth, health, security, coping at the same time how to sustain the illusory social wants that capitalism enforces into people’s mind by the means of propaganda, marketing, publicity, and advertisement, as social musts. All in all, the economic pressure appears to be immense for most part of the average people. On the other hand, the privileged classes of the bourgeois intelligentsia, which became the voice of the political Left as the neoliberal Left, criticizes – from its own perspective of privilege – every single decision of the working class. It has neither a critical historical assessment of the concrete social conditions nor empathy for the suffering of the many. The academic and mediatic publications speak volumes about the shock of cultural values between these two privileged and unprivileged classes. The enlightened portion of the bourgeois politicians, now self-proclaimed as progressives, push – also uncritically – the agenda promoted and developed by the intelligentsia. The result could not be more obvious. The masses seek politicians paired with their contemporary values of crumbling capitalism: namely anti-systemic at a political-economic level, and conservative at the levels of religion and family, while those enlightened politicians and thinkers demonstrate being shocked and extremely puzzled by the ballot results.
While a portion of the western “progressive” Left has caught up with the fact that the British Labour Party, German Grün and SPD, US-American Democratic Party, etc. not only are not but also cannot be part of the solution, they still believe in the so-called western democratic system, where capitalist elites control the economic, the political-economy, the legislative, the public opinion, the politicians and political parties. This paradox is better understood when one looks outside the immediate sphere of the west and the reaction of the same progressives. First, with the same enthusiasm that they call for Global South recognition, they also push upon the same Global South all the western values as again morally and epistemologically superior in themselves. No other better arrangement is possible than the model of capitalist western democracy. Second, the same dichotomies that appear in the core of capitalism exist in the periphery, however, progressives believe that neoliberal candidate A is good while neoliberal candidate B is bad – looking neither for their concrete practices beyond mere discourse nor their history (genesis, alliances, self and class interests and conflicts, etc.). Do they simply not look into it or do not know how? It is vital to understand that the use of concepts and the lack of theory play a fundamental role in this process. For instance, in Brazil while President Bolsonaro (and his allies) and Former President Lula (and his allies) have been almost complete similar when governing the country, the former is called a fascist, the latter a liberator. Yes, their discourses may differ, yet their practices are shockingly alike. (Any resemblance with the United States is not a mere coincidence.) Also, their histories have parallels. While Bolsonaro was a captain of the army, before entering politics, Lula and his party were created by the military dictatorship to shield the government against left-wing opposition and communists, becoming the left wing of the military. Thus, strikes and protests were coordinated between the military, capitalist elite, and workers’ representatives, such as Lula. While before his election, Bolsonaro went to the United States, where he saluted the US-American flag, prior to his 2002 victory, Lula and his party members – forbidden from entering the United States – not only entered the country but went to the White House to receive the empire’s blessing. After that Lula signed the so-called “Carta aos Brasileiros”, revealing how his government would not only not challenge dominant power but assist it as well. From an economic dimension, Bolsonaro’s government represents a true continuity with Lula’s and Dilma’s neoliberal governments, which for their part represented also an endurance with the former neoliberal party in power PSDB (with President F.H. Cardoso). During all different governments, both the financial capital and primary goods exporting elite benefited the most with the big private banks in charge of the economy. During election rallies, both parties (PSDB and PT) would publicly present themselves as great antagonists, as Bolsonaro and Lula also do now. Yet, Lula was against Bolsonaro’s impeachment, in discourse they are adversaries, but in practice, a bipartisan agreement persists over all the relevant questions. The vice-president chosen by Lula in the 2022 election is Geraldo Alckmin, who not only is a member of Opus Dei but also from the party, which Lula and his party publicly reproached for being their greatest adversaries and the greatest threat to Brazil before Bolsonaro emerged in 2018. The hole is much deeper – for instance, the so-called coup d’état against President Dilma was orchestrated with the support from Bolsonaro by the conservative vice-president Michel Temer also chosen by Lula –, along these lines, the Monroe Doctrine has much deeper roots in Latin American than commentators, either willingly or ignorantly, acknowledge, and similar stories can be seen all over the continent (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, etc.). Paraphrasing Tom Jobim, understanding Brazil and Latin America is not a task for amateurs, a critical analysis must, therefore, once and for all forfeit these simplistic binary reasonings of good and bad that ignore all relevant nuances.
This theoretical problem has further dimensions. It is worth mentioning, even if just briefly, another one. Most of the political Left, when not completely subjugated by and to neoliberalism, has a tendency in deifying poverty and admonishing development. Not only poverty is not considered something crucial to be overcome, to be fought against, but it appears, instead, as an element of subcultures that need protection to remain pure. Thus, little effort is made to improve the quality of life in slums. Instead of building infrastructure and objective transformation, one needs, following this romanticized logic, to introduce palliatives. These palliatives pursue fighting discrimination and prejudice but unknowingly promote instead exactly that. It is paternalistic in saying what is needed and racist enough to deny life improvements, which appear superfluous and sub-culturally disruptive. It introduces the need to use concepts such as community substituting the slum concept, yet it poses a constant obstacle to creating a community beyond the reality of the slum. Its idealism is not simply romantic but more importantly destructive. It normalizes and beatifies poverty and conditions of misery. On the same token, poor socialist countries are accepted as alternative models to substitute capitalism, it looks neither the local objective conditions of countries, such as Cuba, which suffers an over 60 years old embargo, making development a nearly impossible task, nor the objective conditions of the masses in capitalist countries that required becoming part of a political process of action and consciousness instead of receiving a socialist-model from abroad, which overlooks the different subjective and objective conditions among different societies. On the other hand, experiments in the soviet countries or the successful but still emergent Chinese socialism are not only overlooked but completely reproved. The former for being swept as a general failure, overlooking the many complexities and attempts involved. The latter is also all in all denied achievements for lack of purity and its capitalist elements. Both accounts lack again historical and theoretical discernment, for socialism is a social practice that cannot be defined a priori nor contain elements of purity. Socialism is a transitory stage beyond capitalist rule and requires experimentation and a constant process of revolution. However, revolution appears as a concept that cannot be taken as something abstract and universally equal. A revolutionary process within a socialist country must be one to supersede capitalist old elements and not one to overthrow the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the west, one can still find roman, medieval, and feudal institutions, yet they do not render capitalism less capitalist. In China, there is capital but not capitalism. Property and the relations of production have changed and are changing. Capital does not rule society, the workers’ party rule capital. Of course, this is a delicate balance of power, whose outcome cannot be defined a priori. But it is imperative to learn from concrete examples, being Cuba or China, the Soviet Union or Venezuela, etc., without falling into the bourgeois binary trap of moral reason.
The contemporary stage of capitalism still can be regarded as imperialism, yet its barbaric levels appear to be becoming ubiquitous in both social and spatial dimensions. The solution for the many existing and emerging problems does not seem to be at hand, for the status quo changing its neoliberal mask to a more neoliberal-proto-fascistic one can only provide more of the same in slightly different shape and colour – outside of the western core, fascistic-neoliberalism has been forcibly implemented for more than 50 years. Trump and his likes have changed the discourse to conquer the minds and hearts of the people but in reality continue to promote capitalist exploitation by the neoliberal PPP (private-public partnership), which enables a constant transfer of wealth from the masses to the capitalist elites, leaving some minor wealth for the compensatory appropriation by its political and bureaucratic operators. On the other hand, the effective inexistence of an anti-capitalist Left is masked by the neoliberal Left’s subjectification of reality, which obliterates learning from history and theory, and denies the weapon of critique to drawing the limits of action. As capitalist possibilities seem exhausted, the revolutionary practice appears an absolute necessity. A revolutionary process does mean neglecting real people, their struggles and values, objective struggles withhold ontological priorities over subjective struggles. These struggles beyond the immediate sphere of labour must become part of the resolution of concrete problems, conflicts and contradictions within the process of the labour struggle. For instance, if the financial system is to be appropriate, democratized and run by the people, thus, transforming its objectives from speculation and profit extraction towards instead the management of social resources to be invested, then people of different credos, colours, sexualities, etc. must find ways to work together to achieve this goal. Thus labour entails an ontological priority as it is a practice towards concrete social goals, nevertheless how labour activities are performed requires the coming together of real people with different both subjective and objective conditions and backgrounds, which appear then as processual necessities and contradictions to be resolved.
The imperialist phase of capitalism created the mental colonization of the political Left, and thus, a major impasse. As the middle class makes confusion between money and capital, it imagines that buying and selling acts are what constitutes capitalist relations, and so does the contemporary Left confound between rhetoric and action. Capitalism appropriates everything, including discourse – so, while the Left focus on concepts and aprioristic definitions, and forgets theory, history, and methodology, the capitalist-powers reign sovereignly and hegemonically, for they rule not through coercion but consent.Postscript. After I had finished writing this article, I became aware of Josep Borrell’s new speech for the launch of the European Diplomatic Academy – part of the European Union’s official bureaucracy. In itself, this speech could inspire a whole new article, but here I just want to highlight the fallacy seen in the dichotomy between the western liberal discourse of democratic values versus its concrete racist, fascistic, colonialist practice of aristocratic values filled with selective memories and distortion of reality. Borrell said: “Europe is a garden. We have built a garden. Everything works. It is the best combination of political freedom, economic prosperity and social cohesion that humankind has been able to build – the three things together.” In contrast: “The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden. The gardeners should take care of it, but they will not protect the garden by building walls. A nice small garden surrounded by high walls in order to prevent the jungle from coming in is not going to be a solution. Because the jungle has a strong growth capacity, and the wall will never be high enough in order to protect the garden.” Hence, it is not that he is against a wall to divide European Eden from the outside jungle of barbaric people, but a wall would not be good enough, so the solution he proposes is the same playbook being used for the last 500 years: more colonialism/neocolonialism. On the one hand, in Europe everything does not work, except with one considers the European Union’s machine of corruption and lobbyism, then one might have to agree with Borrell’s assertion. On the other hand, a major part of the world problems cannot be disassociated from European colonial and neocolonial rule and interference: slave trade and markets, slave labour, wars, extraction of raw materials, plundering, more wars, World War I, World War II, European liberal colonial empires, fascism and NAZI-fascism, racism, eugenics, imperialism and neoliberalism, environmental destruction and exhaustion, the extermination of uncountable species, mass concentration camps, genocides, shock therapy, and the list goes on. Therefore, when he further asserts that: “The gardeners have to go to the jungle. Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world. Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means. Yes, this is my most important message: we have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world.” Then he provides historical revisionism, projects and transfers blame on the victims, and withdraws any responsibility for the infinite crimes committed by Europeans and European rule. The capitalist elite knows only one game with very defined rules: domination, exploitation, appropriation, and accumulation; until the political Left faces this fact, it will continue to be fooled by the good cop, bad cop strategy, in other words, the capitalist one party system with competitive character will continue to provide the capitalist elite with the rhetorical tools to legitimate, justify, and naturalized its domination while most people are left high and dry.
*The site-specific installation by Miltos Manetas, involves works by the artists: Loukia Alavanou, Lizzie Calligas, Sokratis Fatouros, Yorgia Karidi, Kalliopi Nikolou, Leda Papacostantinou, Angelos Papadimitriou, Maria Papadimitriou, Panos Papadopoulos, Theokritos Papadopoulos, Ilias Papailiakis, Eva Papamargariti, Aemilia Papaphilippou, Angelo Plessas, Poka Yio, Madalina Psoma, Georgia Sagri, Danae Stratou, Panos Tsagaris, Jannis Varelas, Costas Varotsos, Kostis Velonis, Vana Xenou, Yioula Xatzigeorgiou, and the writer Apostolos Artinos.
In October 2015, IFAC Athina was established as a satellite studio/project space at 11 Galaxia Street, in the Neos Kosmos neighbourhood of Athens. Having run a seven-year trajectory of tracing and engaging with the multi-layered cartographies of contemporary art, IFAC Athina returns to capturing the uninterrupted immediacy of now through The October Show.
Defining our present-day Octobers, the show brings together theoretical inquiry and art practice to re-address the curatorial process and articulate the historical – social, political, and aesthetic – realities which encompass it.
Under this prism, The October Show is set out as a meta-situationist environment which embraces the uninterrupted flow of energy as the unifying element and appropriates free association as the methodological link between the works and the viewers. In this curatorial endeavour, Athens is the catalyst that communicates the essence of unity of a diverse cross section of artists.
Throughout the exhibition, we will be hosting discussions, screenings, performances.
Iranian artist Meysam Azarzad’s protest message: “As Iranians saw her face, they rubbed their own faces to the ground.” (courtesy the artist, translated by Pamela Karimi)
Recent weeks have seen a surge of protest art in Iran, triggered by the tragic story of Mahsa Amini, a young woman killed on September 16 by the morality police for breaching the Islamic republic’s dress code for women. Since then, civil unrest has grown in more than 80 Iranian cities, with calls for justice as well as personal and political liberties, not to mention hundreds of arrests and violence against protesters, especially young women. Internet access remains limited as the government regulates its usage.
Amid these protests, artists have played an important role in bringing their message to the fore. Shervin Hajipour’s song (#Baray-e [For the sake of or Because of]), recorded in his room and posted on Instagram for limited followers, was shared more than 40 million times on social media platforms in just two days. Taken from #Baraye protest tweets, Hajipour utters the grievances and hopes of Iranians, with a final emphasis on “For Women, Life, Freedom,” the main slogan of recent protests.
Art coming out of Iran (or by artists in the diaspora) has a radical and rebellious zeal, also evident in the visual arts. Consider, for example, the work of dozens of Iranian artists — many of whom are women — who have been featured by Hyperallergic and the Guardian. Brave works with layered meanings, they appropriate concepts and imagery from earlier periods, especially those familiar to Iranians. Meysam Azarzad’s posters shared via Instagram seem to have borrowed from revolutionary themes of earlier years — found in both leftist and Islamist factions that helped overthrow the Shah’s regime in 1979. Using red, white, and black, they also seem to align the recent uprising with the visual culture of other global revolutionary movements. A filmmaker with university training in graphic design, Azarzad refutes any link to Iran’s revolutionary posters, especially those with religious iconography. Juxtaposing bold black-and-white silhouettes of fighting and fallen young women with nationalistic poetry, Azarzad instead highlights their bravery in nationalistic terms. The content of the texts appearing above the women strikes a chord with rhyming couplets from the 11th-century epic Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) by the patriotic poet Abul-Qasem Ferdowsi. One poster shows a defenseless young woman raising her fist — unveiled — to rows of soldiers. The couplet praises a hero, but the typical Shahnameh-style male hero’s name is replaced by “a fighting girl” (dokht-e jangi). The other posters draw our attention to the bravery of two 16-year-old girls. Appearing like saints, Nika Shahkarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh were both beaten to death during protests. The portraits are juxtaposed with poetic lamentations over the death of a heroine, again in the style of Shahnameh.
Artist Meysam Azarzad‘s protest art uses phrases from the 11th-century epic Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”). The poster on the left reads: “Once my father realizes that you’ve slain me, he will seek revenge.” On the right: “This massive army is useless. Indeed, a single fighting girl is worth hundreds of thousands of them.” (images courtesy the artist, translated by Pamela Karimi)
Most of these works were created by graphic designers and illustrators for social media platforms; however, they represent only one of the diverse art forms being produced in contemporary Iran. In response to the current unrest, many have abandoned exhibition and performance for the “anonymous” expression of political views through graffiti and ephemeral installations. In disguise, artists have placed slogans that challenge the country’s clerical leadership; in an ironic twist, many parody the revolutionary slogans of the Islamic republic. On October 7, an anonymous artist created “Tehran in Blood,” dyeing fountains in important cultural centers red. In response to an attack on demonstrators at Tehran’s Sharif University, two anonymous women artists animated trees in Daneshjoo (“University Student”) Park by hanging red nooses from branches. The police swiftly removed these installations, but their pictures persisted on social media platforms and even found their way into mainstream media.
For four decades, though, Iranian art’s defiance has been subdued. Compare two posters by graphic designer Pedram Harby. The one on the left, created for recent protests, is animated by a female mouth ostensibly shouting grievances. Appearing next to a #MahsaAmini hashtag, and between the confidently rendered words “Zan” (Woman) and “Zendegi, Azadi” (Life, Freedom), the work seems bold compared to an earlier poster designed by Harby for Unpermitted Whispers, a 35-minute play by the Iranian theatre director Azadeh Ganjeh staged four times a night in 2012 using ordinary taxis. For each performance, three actors were picked up and dropped off in sequence. The characters in the performance were iconic women in Shakespeare’s plays, such as Ophelia whose intense love, madness, and despair were personified in the character of a woman from contemporary Tehran who spoke of conflicts between ordinary Iranians and the police forces. Despite the play’s political tone, Harby’s poster remains understated. A red traffic light affixed to a Q-tip, the ensemble indicates the threats of being blocked and unheard.
Left: Pedram Harby, “Woman, Life, Freedom” (2022) (courtesy the artist); right: Azadeh Ganjeh, “Unpermitted Whispers“ (2013), poster designed by Pedram Harby (courtesy Azadeh Ganjeh and Studio Harby)
Such indirect visual language has been the dominant visual idiom of Iranian art in the past four decades, because all art has to be sanctioned by an organization that works like the “morality police.” Commonly referred to as Vezarat-e ershad, or Ministry of Guidance (shorthand for the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, hereafter MCIG), the organization has censored the arts since the early 1980s. Iranian artists of all branches have had to improvise to flout this organization’s rules. While the MCIG has tried to suppress artistic expression, however, it has inadvertently pushed artists to be more inventive. Rather than self-censoring, artists have long employed clever tactics for presenting disobedience. While visual artists like Harby use subtle and perplexing iconography, performance artists, like Shahab Fotouhi, draw on what the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht calls Verfremdungseffekt (alienation), the theatrical device that intentionally distances viewers from the fictive narrative and instead engages them in real activities, such as mock performances that look like fully sanctioned political roundtables in Iran and yet somehow challenge the ideals and ideas of the regime.
In my book Alternative Iran, I highlight another important strategy: spatial tactics employed by artists of all genres as well as the curators and architects who team up with them. Such strategies include going literally underground along vertical blocs, even when MCIG permission is granted; distancing oneself from the “official” centers of art production and growing, instead, along horizontal axes; creating ephemeral installations; deploying spatial camouflage; and negotiating the limits of the permitted and the forbidden by manipulating art venues or gallery spaces. Using these spatial strategies, artists have flouted MCIG laws, showcasing politically sensitive art without getting into trouble.
Restrictions imposed by the MCIG have also given form to unconventional modes of art-making, not meant for official venues. Instead, these art forms appear in derelict buildings, leftover urban zones, and remote natural sites. Following the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) and starting in the 1990s, a few exhibitions in rundown and ready-to-renovate homes (kolangi) revived forms of conceptual art (honar-e mafhoomi), performance art (honar-e ejra’ie), and ephemeral art (honar-e mira). Many works were site-oriented rather than site-referenced or site-specific; that is, the site’s shape, history, socioeconomic conditions, and sociopolitical connotations were less important than the fact that the location provided opportunities for freedom of expression that were unavailable in conventional art spaces. However, on the eve of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in 2006 and the imposition of further restrictions on journalists, the abandoned headquarters of the most prominent state-run newspaper, Ettela’at, became a platform for a monumental installation by Farideh Shahsavarani.
Titled I Wrote, You Read, Shahsavarani’s work commented on censorship of the journalistic freedom that had reached its peak after eight years under President Mohammad Khatami. Some newspaper pages were encased in barbed-wire stands; some covered the walls, windows, and ceilings; others appeared in videos accompanied by the sounds of typewriters and sirens. The exhibition also devoted a small room to the memory of journalists who had been arrested and detained. This Gesamtkunstwerk engaged multiple human senses, affirming a form of art viewing that depends not only on our eyes but also on our bodies. Shahsavarani, who did not secure permission from MCIG for her site-specific project, ended up taking it down after one week.
Another spatial technique used for the purpose of subduing protest art has been camouflaging. On August 5, 2013, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term, the police attacked crowds who had gathered outside parliament to protest, arresting many. Against such chaos, Ahmadinejad called for national unity and quoted from Article 121 of the Iranian constitution, vowing to dedicate himself “to serving the people and . . . spreading justice and refraining from any dictatorship.” Artist Katayoun Karami, who took part in the protest, was angered by these deceitful proclamations. Four years later, for the next election day, she created an installation with curator Rozita Sharafjahan at Tehran’s Azad Art Gallery. Titled Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds, an ancient Zoroastrian motto, the project “trapped” visitors as they explored the gallery. Karami had laser-cut the words of Article 121 from mats coated with adhesive from rat traps. The mats covered the floor so visitors could not escape the sticky mess; this was a metaphor “for always being caught in the political predicaments,” Karami reminded. At first, the words were hardly visible to the visitors and the MCIG staff who issued permission; however, after many visits, the sticky pads became dark and decipherable. The visitors, in turn, reluctantly carried home some adhesive on their shoes. Karami, who is from a generation that has seen it all (i.e., the revolution, Iran-Iraq war, Green Movement), believes that engaging visitors’ bodies conveyed the collective discontent with Iran’s political system.
Another prominent artist in the category of camouflage is Pooya Aryanpour, who has been using the trick to subtly tease social and political restrictions within Iran. Relying on traditional mirrorworks, his art ironically exudes a religious air. Mirrorworks are used in Shi‘ite shrines of Iran, covering entire walls, arches, vaults, and ceilings with fragments of mirrors so fractured that one’s reflection is skewed, with an urgency drawn from the teachings of the highest-ranking Shi‘ite clerics that proscribe praying in front of portraits, including one’s own image. Noteworthy among Aryanpour’s camouflaged projects is a 2022 installation of a suspended fabric-like structure whose surface is animated by mirrorwork. Executed in collaboration with curator Maryam Majd and Dastan Gallery, Gone with the Wind hangs in the dark, alluding to several cultural signifiers, from the black banners that commemorate a religious holiday or death of an imam or martyr to the ideal veiling for women, the black chador. The site was an abandoned sugar factory in Kahrizak, a formerly booming industrial area in southern Tehran. The choice for the site, Aryanpour explains, was tied to the work’s meaning — signifying the dark and bright aspects of the Islamic republic at once. Once a site of production, the factory is now nothing more than a vacated space left to decay, a metaphor for the country as a whole. On the Dastan Gallery website, a text by Majd describes it as “beautiful, yet lost,” and that which “directly makes references to us and our lives”, amounting to an “aesthetic allusion” to the “incomplete, contradictory, and unstable situation[s] experienced” by the Iranian people.
Installation view of Pooya Aryanpour, Gone with the Wind (2022) (courtesy Dastan Gallery and the artist)Details of Pooya Aryanpour’s Gone with the Wind (2022) (courtesy Dastan Gallery and the artist)
The few examples of art with tacit political messages presented here attest to a lineage of subtle strategies since the post-revolutionary period that has allowed artists to defy the MCIG. In other words, the recent protest art was set in motion earlier than this September. Indeed, oppositional voices escalated with the election of hardliner President Ebrahim Raisi and the new regulations enacted by his cabinet. In August 2021, when Mohammad Mehdi Esmaili, the newly appointed minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance under President Raisi, issued a new “program” (barnameh) for revamping MCIG’s rubrics to further “Islamicize” the arts, every faction of the arts community published open statements scrutinizing the new “program.” On Instagram, artist Alireza Amirhajebi wrote: “So far, we have shown elasticity (en’etaf) as much as we could. But now it is time for disobedience (sarpichi)….” Thus what we see today is a continuation of what surfaced after a near decade of relative flexibility under President Hassan Rouhani. The brave language of art today, which goes as far as challenging the supreme leader himself, will undoubtedly set a new tone for Iranian art in the months and years to come.
Damien Hirst has begun burning hundreds of his own artworks after selling a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
The artist told buyers who bought pieces from his latest collection to choose either the physical artwork or the NFT representing it.
Those who chose the NFTs were told their corresponding physical piece would be destroyed.
Asked how he felt to be burning the works, Hirst said: “It feels good, better than I expected.”
The artist was dressed in silver metallic boiler-suit trousers and matching fire safety gloves as he collected each piece and burned it in a contained fire box.
It has been estimated the works being burned are collectively worth almost £10 million.
Hirst launched his first NFT collection last year, called The Currency, which was made up of 10,000 NFTs, corresponding to 10,000 original pieces of art.
Collectors who bought one had to choose between keeping the NFT or swapping it for the physical artwork.
London’s Newport Street Gallery said 5,149 buyers opted for the original artworks while 4,851 chose the NFTs.
Artworks for the non-exchanged NFTs would be destroyed, buyers were informed, with Hirst telling his Instagram followers earlier this week that he would burn the first 1,000 artworks on Tuesday.
The NFTs, which depicted colourful spots, reportedly sold for $2,000 (£1,800) each.
Livestreaming the event, the Turner Prize winner and assistants used tongs to deposit individual pieces stacked in piles into fireplaces in the gallery as onlookers watched.
“A lot of people think I’m burning millions of dollars of art but I’m not,” Hirst said. “I’m completing the transformation of these physical artworks into NFTs by burning the physical versions.
“The value of art, digital or physical, which is hard to define at the best of times will not be lost; it will be transferred to the NFT as soon as they are burnt.”
The artworks were created in 2016 with enamel paint on handmade paper and each numbered, titled, stamped and signed.
They will be burned until The Currency exhibition closes on 30 October.
Before Hirst burned each artwork, he showed it to a camera to log its unique code to keep track of every piece that had been burnt.
Many have criticised Hirst for burning his own valuable artworks during a cost of living crisis.
“I’s almost like Damien Hirst is so out of touch with the real world that he’s basically transcended to another plane of existence, populated only by oligarchs and the once-edgy artists they collect,” wrote Time Out’s Eddy Frankel.
“Still, look at it this way, even if you can’t afford to turn on your heating at home, just go to Newport Street Gallery: it’s free and it should be nice and toasty with all those £20,000 paintings on fire.”
Hirst, who is no stranger to what some critics describe as publicity stunts, rose to fame during the 1990s Young British Artist scene.
He picked up the Turner Prize in 1995 and his work has sold for millions, but he is also one of Britain’s most controversial artists.
Much of his work has divided critics, including one featuring a dead shark floating in formaldehyde and another consisting of a bisected cow and calf.
The 57-year-old is also known for his spot paintings and “For The Love Of God”, a platinum cast of an 18th-century human skull encrusted with diamonds.
Speaking to the BBC about his art in 2018, he said: “If I put it in a skip outside a pub, would someone take it home? And you think, ‘yeah, they would.’ If it’s good, it won’t get left in the street. I think that’s a good way of working out if a painting’s good or not.”
NFTs are “one-of-a-kind” assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but which have no tangible form of their own.
The digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.
Traditional works of art such as paintings are valuable precisely because they are one of a kind.
But digital files can be easily and endlessly duplicated.
With NFTs, artwork can be “tokenised” to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold.
NFTs soared in popularity last year as crypto-rich speculators sought to cash in on rising prices but sales volumes have fallen more recently.
A scheme plans to give people working in the arts a payment each week so they can pursue their creative work
Approximately 2,000 artists, actors, musicians and other performers are set to be paid a basic income by the Irish government for three years.
A consultation on how the Basic Income for the Arts scheme will run has opened.
It will provide a specific number of people working in the arts with a payment each week so they can pursue their creative work.
A basic payment of €10.50 (£8.75) an hour is suggested in the consultation.
However, the overall income is yet to be decided.
As in Northern Ireland, arts and entertainment venues in the Republic of Ireland were closed for long periods due to Covid-19 restrictions.
An Arts and Culture taskforce was set up by the Irish minister for tourism, culture, arts, Gaeltacht, sports and media, Catherine Martin, to suggest ways in which the arts could recover from the “unprecedented damage” caused by the pandemic.
Artists affected by Covid curbs to get up to £2k Irish pub installation wins Turner Prize 2021
Its top recommendation was to pilot a basic income scheme for “a three-year period in the in the arts, culture, audio-visual and live performance and events sectors”.
Ms Martin previously said that the Irish government was committing about €25m (£20.87m) to the scheme and it would be up and running in early 2022.
More details have now been provided in the consultation which opened on Thursday and runs until the 27 January.
It asks for views on details like what the objectives of the scheme should be, who should be eligible for the income, how they will be selected and what the appropriate level of pay should be.
While it is not clear exactly how many of those working in the arts and culture will get the payment, a figure of 2,000 people has previously been suggested.
According to the consultation, if there are more people eligible for the scheme than there are places available then participants may have to be selected at random.
In a statement, Ms Martin called the Basic Income for the Arts a “once-in-a-generation policy intervention”.
There have been a number of schemes in Northern Ireland aimed at providing support to people working in arts and culture and venues affected by pandemic restrictions.
Nightclubs briefly reopened in October 2021 after being closed for a year and a half and social distancing requirements were removed for indoor music venues.
In September 2022, Amir Kiyaei, DiEM25 Policy Coordinator, joined a delegation of the Progressive International comprising 15 people from 12 countries, on a trip to Western Sahara to bear witness to the enduring struggle for Sahrawi liberation.
When Spain withdrew from the colony in 1975, Morocco immediately claimed control. Since then, Sahrawi people have faced division, displacement, and the violence of an occupying force that has terrorised them and plundered their resources. Nearly five decades later, Western Sahara remains the last colony in Africa.
Today, part of the Sahrawi population lives in a series of refugee camps in the Sahara desert in western Algeria, where the delegation stayed.
All along in their struggle, international solidarity has been key to Sahrawi resistance. This visit was just the beginning. DiEM25 and the Progressive International will continue to work together to support the Sahrawi struggle from our organisations, countries, and continents. And you can join us.
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