VICE: Can you start by telling me about your trip over to the US. What plans do you have in the pipeline with Bernie?
Yanis Varoufakis: To begin with, an internationalist progressive agenda has been in the offing and desperately needed for quite a while now. In my estimation of the state of play globally, 2008 [the financial crash] was a momentous instant. It changed the world. Nothing that has been happening since 2008 makes sense anymore in terms of the conventional wisdom before 2008.
On the one hand we have a very effective internationalism practiced by members of the financial community. They have banded together to protect their individual interests – not the interests of the financial sector, but their individual interests – and that has shifted the burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of those who had never had organisational capacities beyond the limits of the nation state, and who very quickly became the victims of this cynical shifting of the burden of the bank's losses, also known as austerity. That bred discontent, discontent bred a second wave of internationalism among the xenophobic, racist neo-fascistic right. Steve Bannon's sojourn across Europe is just one example of how they are banding together and internationalising.
So some of us have been arguing for a while that progressives must internationalise too. And we must juxtapose internationalism against globalism.