Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 party and professor of economics at the University of Athens

Capitalism conquered the world by commodifying almost everything that had a value but not a price, thus driving a sharp wedge between values and prices. It did the same to money. The exchange value of money always reflected people’s readiness to hand over valuable things for given sums of cash. But, under capitalism, once Christianity accepted the idea of charging for loans, money also acquired a market price: the interest rate or the price of leasing a pile of cash for a given period.