For most of his adult life, Yanis Varoufakis was merely a disgruntled academic: a mathematically trained economist with an expertise in game theory, but also an intellectual disdain for traditional economics. After the global economic meltdown in 2008, he emerged as a second-tier public intellectual, actively participating in the debate regarding the European financial crisis via his online blog, Twitter, and published works.
Then, just a few months ago, Yanis added politician to his list of assumed careers, running as a parliamentary candidate in Athens as a member of Syriza, a left-wing Greek political party. Finally, with Syriza’s victory in the Greek general elections this January, he put on his policymaker’s hat, as Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras officially appointed him as Greece’s new Finance Minister.
The elaborate arc that Yanis’ career has followed is certainly a unique one, especially since he declares himself an “unapologetic Marxist.” Radical academics rarely double as parliamentarians or technocratic policymakers (not to mention as apparent fashion icons). Compared to some of the politically impotent ivory-tower intellectuals who represent the most prominent voices of the modern left, Yanis makes you wonder why those of today’s students with radical sympathies tend to take their radicalism to the academy instead of to public policy circles.
Indeed, in its embodiment of the experience of the radicalized academic-turned-policymaker, Yanis’s career exemplifies the ideal path through which young, aspiring American and European intellectuals of the left can gain real political authority: by leveraging scholarly successes in some policy-relevant field in order to ascend to positions of direct political power. If you’re a college student with radical sympathies and trying to figure out which path in life will help you effect the most substantive change in the world, Yanis’ story has some lessons to offer you.
Varoufakyou, Eurogroup
The inner circles of the European policymaking community aren’t where you would normally expect to find someone who lists Marx as one of his foremost inspirations, despite what all the nominally Socialist parties that represent the European center-left want you to think. Even when parties of the “far-left” are in power, as the Western media has largely portrayed Syriza since its parliamentary victory in January, Marx-inspired academics are scarce at all levels of European and American government. What differentiates Yanis in this respect is the particular field in which he pursued his academic career: not philosophy or literary criticism, nor any kind of [insert name of historically marginalized group here] studies. Instead, Yanis is an economist, making him the rare kind of modern leftist that pursues an academic career in a discipline with direct implications for public policy.
Yanis entered economic academia in the 1980s, choosing to specialize in the highly mathematical and tremendously technical subject of game theory. In doing this, he entered a field in which no kind of radical political sympathies have any direct relevance. This lack of emphasis on his own ideological views seems to be a general theme in Yanis’ professional narrative. He has also consistently abstained from making any references to his radicalism in his discussions of the European financial crisis since 2008. However, Yanis has clearly remained in touch with his Marxist roots throughout his professional career. From the title of his 1987 doctoral thesis in economics, “Optimization and Strikes”, to his lecture at the 2013 Subversive Festival in Zagreb in which he detailed his lifelong intellectual development as a libertarian Marxist, Yanis has consistently made subtle hints to his leftist politics throughout his time as an academic and public intellectual.
Capitalizing on his legitimacy in the academy, Yanis got his first taste of the pubic policy world from 2004 to 2006 as an economic adviser to the Greek center-left politician George Papandreou, who headed the PASOK party. By the time Papandreou became the country’s Prime Minister in 2009, when the Greek financial crisis was first starting to grow in severity, Yanis had turned against PASOK and emerged as one of its foremost critics. He took a strong public position against the neoliberal, austerian policies of the Papandreou government and the center-right ones that followed it. He leveraged the credibility that his academic background had afforded him as an expert in all matters economic to censure multiple Greek governments’ approach to resolving Greece’s macroeconomic and financial malaise.
These days, after getting more involved in Syriza and the Greek left more generally in recent years, Yanis is now both a prominent figure within the party and the new Greek Finance Minister. He has started letting his true radical colors show and has begun to assert himself against the Eurogroup, the joint meeting of Eurozone finance ministers that represents Greece’s European creditors in the country’s debt negotiations. Mind you, he has undoubtedly stayed within the bounds of what is considered respectable technocratic dealmaking: he promises that Syriza’s Greece will “not ask [its] partners for a way out of repaying [its] debts, while assuring his critics that he “is [not] motivated by some radical-left agenda.” Nevertheless, he has also gone on the record to say that he is “determined to clash with mighty vested interests in order to reboot Greece” and declared that he will not allow the country “to be treated as a debt colony.”
Though his first achievement as a radical policymaker was a mixed success—securing a four-month extension on Greek’s debt repayments, but without any longer-term concessions from the country’s creditors—Yanis will likely serve as a menace to the Eurogroup throughout his time as the Greek Finance Minister. His legitimacy as an academic economist having got him into office in the first place, he can now assert himself in his newfound position of real political power. This is the role of the radical when conferred with true political authority, which is why Yanis’ career represents the optimal path that any aspiring, young student of the left should follow if they crave the opportunity to make substantive change in the world. His experiences demonstrate the viability of the academy as a potential instrument of radicalism, particularly as a practical and otherwise unavailable means through which radicals could enter the realm of public policy.
Embrace Your Inner Yanis
Despite the current rarity of the radicalized academic-turned-policymaker, the revolving door-like phenomenon between academic and public policy circles is quite common. This is especially true in economics, as the institutional links between central banks, finance ministries, and economics departments in Europe and the United States are generally very strong. Yanis’ emergence as a radical policymaker exemplifies this fact.
However, radical academic-turned-policymakers are low in numbers in most Western governments. This absence of radicals in positions of political and technocratic authority is partially explained by the fact that most leftist university students are generally turned off by economics and other public policy-related fields. (Of course, neoliberal governments tend to avoid appointing radicals to public policy positions in the first place, but that’s a separate issue.
The problem is that the material studied in classes that have any relevance to public policy oftentimes lacks the necessary characteristics to attract students of a radical bent. Courses in economics and public policy, for example, suffer from an ignorance of the humanity of the human subjects they claim to study. They discuss issues like unemployment and healthcare, which are directly relevant to the lives of most people, in terms of efficiency and cost-benefit analysis rather than morality and justice. This undoubtedly frustrates those few politically radicalized students that take these courses. Moreover, the kinds of implications that are drawn in such policy-relevant fields are usually incongruent with the aims and aspirations of student radicals. For example, when Economics and Woodrow Wilson School professors ask their students how they would resolve this or that problem of public policy, they normally won’t take “redistribution,” let alone “revolution,” as a viable answer.
Radicalized students with plans to enter academia must endure through these courses if they seek to make real, substantive change in the world. They must learn to temper their intellectual frustrations and be like Yanis, who, as an academic economist, stomached 30 years of studying traditional economics and all its pro-market implications to one day have sufficient academic legitimacy to become a technocratic official. They must thoroughly reorient their scholarly priorities, moving away from fields, particularly cultural studies, that fail as pragmatic means of gaining political power and instead into economics, game theory, and other disciplines related to public policy. They must then for years and years moderate and, if necessary, even suppress their radicalism within their own academic work. And they must do so until the point when they possess sufficient credibility as an expert in some policy-relevant field to have even the semblance of an opportunity to be offered a position of political power. And, once they eventually earn such real political authority, once Syriza or some other up-and-coming party of the uncompromising left appoints them as the Minister of Health, the Labor Secretary, or, maybe even like Yanis, the all-powerful Finance Minister, they can then finally unleash their inner radical and implement policies that will bring forth progressive reform, if not revolutionary change to society.
If this sounds like a fairytale situation that some naive, radical youth came up with in his free time, you’re probably right. Nevertheless, even though it’s highly improbable that this narrative—Yanis’ narrative—ever plays out in full again, the potential societal benefits from it occurring just once are high enough to merit a call-to-arms for young, aspiring radicals to pursue academic careers in economics and other public-policy fields. Though the phenomenon of the radical-economist-turned-policymaker is undoubtedly a rare one, Yanis’ experience has shown that it is at least a possible one, whereas the ivory-tower philosopher or critical theorist’s appointment to a position of real political power has proven impossible.
Yanis is currently the Greek Finance Minister, and, if Podemos continues its political rise in Spain, there may soon also be an incarnation of Varoufakis in Madrid. But there are no Zizeks in positions of political authority anywhere in the Western world, nor will there ever be. If you’re a student with radical sympathies at some American or European university, take note of that.