The Greek economy has been bled dry by vulture funds and austerity, making citizens too poor to lose a day’s wages. The left has an onerous task ahead

Rena never knew a strike in Greece she did not support, never missed a rally that our party endorsed. But on Wednesday, at a rally to mark a rare nationwide general strike, Rena was not there. Worried, I rang her. No, nothing untoward had happened. “I just can’t afford to lose a day’s wages, not this week,” she said, apologetically. Having lost her flat last year to a vulture fund – an investment fund that buys shares cheaply in companies that are failing in order to take control, improve their performance and so make money – Rena was struggling to pay this month’s rent, which eats up 60% of her income. “I shall join you briefly, during my lunch break,” she promised.

Rena is not atypical. The turnout for the general strike was depressingly low. Margaret Thatcher was right that a combination of austerity and the financialisation of working-class housing (through the sale of council houses) is the perfect poison for the trade union movement. In Greece, the financialisation of housing took a more circuitous route. A chance meeting in 1998 with a director of a major German bank had alerted me to it long before it unfolded.

Yanis Varoufakis is the leader of MeRA25, a former finance minister and author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism