Taylor Lecture Oxford University

Realistic Utopias versus Dystopic Realities: Reflections on writing about an alternative economic present. Yanis Varoufakis' last book was addressed to his teenage daughter. It offered her a simple, though not simplistic, account on how capitalism works and how it fails. Critics, correctly, pointed out that the book's criticisms of capitalism (couched in parables borrowed from literature, theatre and science fiction) never really answered the pressing question: 'But what's the alternative? Could social and economic relations be substantially different given human nature and really existing technologies?' In this lecture Varoufakis will speak both to the difficulties in answering this question and to the importance of trying to answer it. Any answer, he will argue, involves writing a modern Utopia. But the trick is to write it (a) without resorting to magical thinking, un-invented technologies or a view of humanity through rose-tinted glasses, while (b) never forgetting that our current (unbearable to most people) reality is defended by means of economic theories that are no more than exercises in vulgar science fiction. Utopian fiction, in other words, is unavoidable. The point is how effectively to expose the science fictions supporting an insupportable capitalism and juxtapose them against humanist science fictions of an alternative, realistic present.
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Yanis Varoufakis: Economics professor, quietly writing obscure economic texts for years, until thrust onto the public scene by Europe's inane handling of an inevitable crisis.