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Without a currency that could appreciate against those of her trading partners, German productivity increased and its technical excellence produced a declining real cost of exports, while in its European trading partners, deprived of currencies that could depreciate, stable purchasing power and easy credit produced a corresponding increase in demand for German goods.

Stiglitz concedes that austerity may eventually work, but he argues that even if it does, the cost is too high. Better to allow countries to declare bankruptcy and start over, just as individuals and firms can do in a domestic economy. Varoufakis and Galbraith dismiss austerity as flatly self-defeating, because low growth simply ends up increasing the debt-to-GDP ratio.

Germany has emerged almost unscathed—at least so far. Berlin has preserved the existing euro system, which advantages it as an international creditor, an exporter of high-quality goods, and a country that suppresses wage increases. It has enjoyed lower interest rates and higher growth than the rest of Europe, which has depressed the real cost of its exports, resulting in a trade surplus larger in absolute terms than China’s.

As Tory turned mercilessly against Tory, the schism in the Conservative establishment received much attention. But a parallel (thankfully more civilized) split afflicted my side: the left.

As I travel across Europe, advocating a pan-European movement to confront the EU’s authoritarianism, I sense a great surge of internationalism in places as different from one another as Germany, Ireland, and Portugal. Distinguished Lexiteers, like Harvard’s Richard Tuck, are prepared to risk quashing this surge. They point to pivotal moments when the left took advantage of Britain’s lack of a written constitution to expropriate private medical business and create its National Health Service and other such institutions. “A vote to stay within the EU,” Tuck writes, “will…end any hope of genuinely left politics in the UK.”

Many leftists find it hard to fathom why I campaigned for “Remain” after EU leaders vilified me personally and crushed Greece’s “Athens Spring” in 2015. Of course, no truly progressive agenda can be revived through the EU institutions. DiEM25 was founded on the conviction that it is only against EU institutions, but within the EU, that progressive politics has a chance in Europe. Leftists once understood that the good society is to be won by entering the prevailing institutions in order to overcome their regressive function. “In and against” used to be our motto. We should revive it.

Is there an alternative? I think so: A Progressive International that resists the narrative of isolationism and promotes inclusive humanist internationalism in place of the neoliberal Establishment’s defence of the rights of capital to globalise.

DiEM25 is encouraging progressives in the US, who supported Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, in Canada and in Latin America to band together into a Democracy in the Americas Movement.

Since the mid-1970s, once the first post-war capitalist phase ended (with the collapse of the New Deal-inspired Bretton Woods system), those relying on wage income to live have fallen off the escalator. Most of the gains from technology, productivity, globalisation, have gone to the top 1% and none to the bottom 80%. People can put up with poverty, but not with humiliation – not with having their noses rubbed in their poverty by people in yachts, golf clubs and Mercedes Benzes, telling them that their poverty is self-inflicted.