His analysis points to the fundamental flaw in Marxism while not just ignoring but praising it: it rests on the notion that "binary oppositions" completely dominate world history and social dynamics. Class struggle, class opposition, is what defines left-wing thinking.

He's not wrong that Marx relied on manufacturing a sense of "binary oppositions" to drive his cartoon of history, but while such a story is great for creating drama it does a demonstrably, repeated, empirically terrible job as a way of either understanding history or changing the world, unless by "changing the world" you mean "changing the world into one vast prison camp".

It is far too easy to pass from benign academic twaddle about "binary oppositions" to "us vs them" to "you're either with us or against us... and we get to say which you are, not you." Marxism is made for the power-mad, precisely because of this obsession with the "binary oppositions" Varoufakis is so enamoured of.

The insistence that "binary oppositions" dominate history does strongly inform the labour theory of value, but the analysis is transparently false. Labour is special because human beings have a special place in any political economy, simply because there wouldn't be one without us. But the "binary opposition" he sees as being unique to labour is nonsense, and this would be obvious if the role of "binary oppositions" in his theory didn't serve as a major distraction to analysis.

Consider for a moment the "binary opposition" between electricity's value-creating potential that can never be quantified in advance, and electricity as a quantity that can be sold for a price. A kWhr that goes into a supercomputer to calculate the optimal shape of a machine part creates value of a kind and in amounts that is utterly unlike a kWhr that goes into driving a washing machine at a laundromat.

This is precisely the "binary opposition" that Varoufakis touts as being unique to labour. It is nothing of the kind. It was nothing of the kind in the days when a lump of coal could be used to heat a pauper's hut or fire a steel mill. All economic inputs have both an unquantifiable-in-advance value-creating capacity and a market value.

Humans are fascinated by conflict. Present us with a conflict and it will grab our limited attention, leaving very little over to ask, "Hey, all this sound and fury is kind of signifying nothing."

This is the most important role of "binary oppositions" in Marxism (and its bastard step-child, post-modernist literary analysis.) It uses this simple flaw in our attentional structure to allow people to smuggle claims that would otherwise be obviously false right under our noses.

Do capital and labour have somewhat different interests? Sure. Do they have many interests that are also shared, based on their common nature of human beings? Absolutely. This is not a binary opposition. This is an argument for a democratic clearing house where differences are aired and decisions made. There needs to be eternal vigilance that one side or the other (mostly the other) doesn't gain undue influence in such a place, but the false belief that the world is dominated by black-and-white "binary oppositions" is completely unhelpful in this enterprise. It sheds no light on our legitimate differences, and trying to fix things up later on by talking about "intersectionality" is a poor patch on a broken analysis.

We are not a set of 1's and 0's in binary opposition to each other, some with the bit flipped to "labour", some to "capital". We are human beings, full of contradictions far more complex and diverse than this ridiculous scientistic reductionism can possibly encompass.