Yanis Varoufakis’ article in the Guardian on Wednesday, titled “Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist”, is a reprint of an article that the iconoclastic Greek minister had written before he turned to politics — something he said he’d never do.

The article focuses on what (today’s) left can learn from Marx’s mistakes (a century and a half ago).

He writes:

After I returned to Greece in 2000, I threw my lot in with the future prime minister George Papandreou, hoping to help stem the return to power of a resurgent right wing that wanted to push Greece towards xenophobia both domestically and in its foreign policy. As the whole world now knows, Papandreou’s party not only failed to stem xenophobia but, in the end, presided over the most virulent neoliberal macroeconomic policies that spearheaded the eurozone’s so-called bailouts thus, unwittingly, causing the return of Nazis to the streets of Athens. Even though I resigned as Papandreou’s adviser early in 2006, and turned into his government’s staunchest critic during his mishandling of the post-2009 Greek implosion, my public interventions in the debate on Greece and Europe have carried no whiff of Marxism.

Despite this belief, he still calls himself a Marxist because Karl Marx was responsible for framing his “perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this very day.”