Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robertson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs magazine.

My guest today is Janus Varfakis, former Greek finance minister, current member of the Greek parliament,

founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, professor of economics at the University of Athens,

and the author most recently of Another Now Dispatches from an Alternative Present.

Janus Verafakis, thank you so much for joining me. It is a wonderful pleasure. Thank you.

Now, you have written economics textbooks.

You have now written a novel.

Readers should know, going into this book, that while it is a novel,

it's a very particular kind of novel,

in that it spends a lot more time than perhaps most novels discussing alternatives to the banking

system, and that's deliberate. It is in a genre that is a genre that has a long tradition,

which is the sometimes called the utopian novel, perhaps better called

the speculative socialist novel of ideas in the tradition of Edward Bellamy's looking

backward, William Morris's news from nowhere. So let me start by asking you as an economist,

as a politician, why did you decide to use this particular medium in order? What were you, what

we tried to do by using the socialist speculative novel of ideas? Well, the reason is,

you know, when I have to explain to people how things work in our society today, I can do it

with prose that begins with a historical account of where we were

and moving to where we are and how things work.

But when I have to ask myself the impossible question of how could things have been working instead?

What kind of alternative system could we be living in?

Then I have a big problem with myself.

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