The neoliberal shift wasn't actually about shrinking the state. What it was about was about crushing collective power. The physical assertion of the power of the state, that was the literal beating up of minors, the use of the police to put them in their place.
But there was this ideological shift as well, which was you are not a worker, you are not a citizen, you are a consumer. This like toxic individualism that has become so pervasive within our society has allowed our political class to basically get away with murder. We need to be presenting the idea of socialism.
Not as a project of protection, but as a project of collective empowerment. Grace Blakely, hello. Hi.
How's it going? Good, thanks. How are you?
Very well. Very glad to have you here in the Poljo studio. Lovely to be here.
Yes, great to have you here. We're talking because of this weighty tone. Vulture capitalism, corporate crimes, backdoor bailouts and the death of freedom.
A lot of substance, which we're going to get into. I'm glad you think so. Did you enjoy it? I did.
Good. But first... For those who don't know who you are, how would you like to introduce yourself?
So I'm Grace Blakely. I am a writer. I write about political economy.
This is my latest book. I've also got... QVC style.
Available in all good bookstores. I'm also a staff writer for Tribune magazine. And I do bits and pieces in the media. Nice. OK.
In that subheading there, Death of Freedom, I think that's the bit that stands out to me most and is sort of recurrent throughout, right? This loss of freedom. Yeah.
or a lack of it under capitalism. So can you start us off there? Why is it that we're not free in our capitalist system?
I'm really glad that that kind of came through as the central message of the book because that is really where I wanted to start. I think, you know, we are fed this line that we live in this free market democratic system, right? And that that's what capitalism is. Capitalism means free markets and democracy and the kind of incursion of the state into the economy.
limits freedom and creates this problem of big government. And that results in this kind of dichotomized politics that we have at the moment, where it's basically just a debate between some people saying, we need more market, less government, and other people saying we need, like, more government, less market. And I just think that that kind of divide is so just sterile and unhelpful.
And this really came through, I think, during the COVID-19 pandemic. So I started writing this book, which just come out of the 2019 election defeat and went straight into the everything that was going on around around COVID. And I started being asked, like on mainstream TV questions like, oh, well, you know, the government spending loads of money. This is basically Corbynism.
This is what you wanted. You've got what you campaigned for. And I started to realize that people had there was just this amazing, astonishing misunderstanding as to what capitalism actually is and what socialism is.
People thought that capitalism meant, you know, like free markets and the state not doing anything, despite the fact that actually existing capitalism everywhere has a very, very active role for the state. You know, that spending that was taking place during Covid, it was basically the government funneling money into massive corporations, to landlords, into the financial system. And somehow we're led to believe that that is socialism, that the government propping up big business is socialism.
So I kind of wanted to cut through that divide and say like, you know, this. State versus market thing, it doesn't really work. It rests on this distinction between politics and economics.
It doesn't really stand up in practice. You know, most of the time, the state is acting to defend the interests of big business and big businesses working within the state and alongside the state to do what it wants to do. So how can we understand what like a kind of progressive, liberatory politics actually means in that context?
And for me, this always comes back to the dirty word, Marxism. I think, you know, there's so much misunderstanding as to what that means as well. And I kind of start the book by looking at these two quotes.
One is from Marx, which is about him saying, you know, the worker is treated as a kind of a bee under capitalism, where they just kind of follow orders and kind of buzz around the hive. Whereas actually they're architects. They learn to kind of create. They kind of yearn to create worlds in their head and bring those into being with their hands.
And I contrast that with the kind of the quote from this free market, the kind of darling of the neoliberals, Hayek, who basically says freedom of thought is only of relevance to a small minority. And it's him and actually even Keynes and most of the big thinkers that we hold up in our political debate. They basically all believe, whether they're on the center left or the center right, that the vast majority of people.
should not be given the power to govern themselves because they're too stupid or they're too impulsive or they don't understand the stakes of the decisions that they're making. Whereas for me, the fundamental insight of Marxism is that the only way we get to liberation, the only way we get to a fair and just society is when people take power, when they take power. within their workplaces, in their communities, over political life as a whole. Because politicians aren't going to listen to you if you don't demand it. You know, corporations certainly aren't going to behave themselves if you don't, like, force them to.
It's really up to us to actually begin to kind of build the society that we want from the ground up. Risk of asking an absurdly broad question, but seeing as you just said it there about this kind of mischaracterization of what Marxism means, what does Marxism mean to you? I know you spoke about it a little bit there, but maybe could you try and put some truth to that?
that sort of ism, if you like, that style of thought, that method of political analysis? Yeah, totally. So as a kind of way of understanding capitalism, it's, as you say, a kind of mode of analysis that begins by looking at the way that we produce things. society.
So rather than say looking at like the prevailing ideas within the society and saying you know history is driven forward by these great battles between different you know groups of ideologies or different sets of ideas, Marxism says most of what happens within our society is shaped by the conditions in which things are produced. And the insight about capitalism is that it is a social system that rests upon the fact that that some people own all the things that we need to produce things and there's this big class of people who cannot survive other than by selling their labour power for a living. So just as an example you know there's a difference between capitalism, this social system based on the production of commodities, class-based system based on the production of commodities, and feudalism which is the system that revolves around land where you have an aristocracy that's in charge.
And again, this is about how things are produced, like the political dynamics of feudalism come back to the fact that a small class owns all the land and the peasants have to work it to get what they need to subsist. In the same way, the insight of Marxism is that it's this class divided society oriented around the production of commodities which are sold for profit. And that that is undertaken through this class division, the social division of labor, where basically working people, the people who are forced to sell their labor power, are exploited by the ones who own things.
Because. they own the stuff that everyone else needs just to be able to live. And it's from that that you then begin to understand the dynamics that I highlight in the book.
Because the other way of looking at capitalism is, as I've said, that it's a system based on private property and free markets, basically. And then you have these ideas that only human freedom can be protected by free markets and free markets are the only systems that lead to kind of democracy and respect for human rights, all those different sorts of things. That's the kind of lie that we're told about the way capitalism works. But if you start from this perspective of seeing capitalism as this system that's based basically on class domination, then things start to make a little bit more sense because we don't actually have free markets.
You know, there's lots of examples in this book where I show that most of the major industries within the world's economy are dominated by one or two firms that are deeply corrupt and like in the pockets of politicians and vice versa. So I start with the example of Boeing, right, which has been in the news recently for the doors blowing off its planes, you know, about 13,000 feet in the air. This comes on the back of these crashes that took place several years ago now. where over 350 people died in two separate crashes where Boeing planes just nosedived out of the air.
I won't give you all the gory details, but suffice to say, people at Boeing knew about the flaws in this plane before it was put on the market. They deleted references to the system that caused the problem in the pilot manual. They didn't tell anyone what was going on. These concerns weren't raised. When the planes did crash, they tried to blame the pilots.
The FAA, the regulator. basically did nothing. And throughout all of this, the American state was channeling billions of dollars worth of tax cuts and subsidies into Boeing.
And I think what that shows is that this argument that, you know, let's say this problem with Boeing, right, it shows that the market doesn't work and we need to hand more power to the government. Well, actually, the government was just as involved with this as the executives at Boeing. And it's because capitalism is this system where everything is oriented around making sure that the people who are in control of the production process basically get what they want, right? And so the only way to push back against that isn't to say, let's give more power to politicians, because, you know, half the time they're in the pockets of these guys. It's actually to say, how do we hand power, how do we pull power down?
So how could workers within Boeing have organised to resist both their exploitation and the kind of corruption of this company? And there's another example in the book I look at of the Lucas Plan where workers in an aerospace company in the UK did just that. did just that. They kind of organised to take, try and take control of the firm. The audio recordings between the pilots union and Boeing are extraordinary to listen to.
Yes. Okay, I was going to ask you about planned economies, which are typically associated with communism. But seeing as you mentioned feudalism, I just want to, at risk of taking It's on a tangent already, but why not?
We had Yanis Varoufakis in here a couple of months ago talking about techno-feudalism, right? And this idea that actually we're past capitalism now, and what our modern economic model actually far more closely resembles feudalism than a lot of people would like to believe, that these sort of cloud capital, these huge companies, these huge corporations are actually, in a way, modern feudal lords. What did you make of that argument?
I don't know if you read the book, I know I appreciate it. I have, yeah, I have. I really like Yanis. I interviewed him for his book launch, actually, a couple of months ago. and I agree with a lot of his analysis but I think we we come at it from different perspectives because whilst you know a lot of the stuff that he writes about in terms of like the detail and the analysis as to what's happening with the economy I totally agree with I just think that that is part of capitalism and you get you see a lot of this stuff in kind of progressive economics where you get critiques of the way that the economy works from people who say you well, this isn't real capitalism.
You know, they say like, for example, the dominance of finance means actually that you've got these, you know, monopolistic banks kind of sucking rents out of the economy as though they are kind of the modern examples of like feudal lords. Or, you know, you've got too much concentrated corporate power. That means we don't have free markets. So it's not capitalism.
And again, I come back to this point that capitalism does not mean free markets. Those two things are not. the same. Markets are an important part of the way that capitalism functions.
They're a very important ideological part of the way capitalism functions. You have to believe that you're competing against other people in this market for your labour, otherwise the system loses legitimacy. But the actual functioning of production in the capitalist system centres far more on stuff that happens within massive monopolistic corporations than it does on the interactions that take place in the market. And this isn't a new thing. You know, in the book, I go back to just like the example of the East India Company, right, where this was like this massive joint venture between some wealthy and powerful people who gained the right to create this big corporate entity.
and the British state in pursuit of imperial power. And that's another part of the book, which is that, you know, this nexus of power that we see at the level of the domestic economy, the kind of fusion of state and corporate power is often projected over the whole world economy in the form of imperial power. And, yeah, this was a big part of the development of British capitalism. The East India Company, Adam Smith, called it a strange absurdity. He said it was a state in the disguise of a merchant and all the kind of original theorists of capitalism.
were like, this doesn't really make sense. This doesn't fit within the way that we think about capitalism. But it was, you know, companies like the East India Company and the AIC itself were central to the development of this, of the capitalist system across the world.
So there isn't this clean distinction between, you know, corporate power and kind of free market capitalism. Those two things go hand in hand. The Anarchy by William Dalrymple is a really interesting study on the East India Company.
It's great, yeah. I've forgotten the name of it now, but there's a method of system analysis which basically says if you want to understand the intention of a system, you don't look at how it was designed, you just look at the outcomes, right? Yes, exactly, yeah. And so if you look at capitalism and you say, well, modern capitalism is defined by financialisation, by the extraction of economic rent, then it actually doesn't particularly matter if that was never the intention.
If that's what it is now, then actually that's one of the defining characteristics of it. Yeah, no, completely. And I think there is you can start by looking at the outcomes, of course, and that is important. And saying that capitalism kind of isn't working in the way it's supposed to. It kind of harkens back to people who are like, oh, well, you know, the like state socialism practice in the USSR isn't real state socialism.
And yeah, I mean, I think that that was state socialism and it's different to democratic socialism, which is what I'm arguing for. But it's kind of a bit of a... It's kind of a non-argument, isn't it really? It's like, capitalism could be this nice, lovely, fluffy, wonderful thing, but it's just not working because it's being kind of corrupted by people at the top.
And often this actually veers into like anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, right? Because people say, oh, capitalism is this lovely system, but it's being corrupted by kind of evil financiers or, you know. weird kind of lizard people or whatever.
I'm not up to date with all the latest conspiracy theories. Not up to date. I think that one's still floating around.
There's some great YouTube videos where there's like a glitch or something of like a royal and people are like, that was him shapeshifting. He's just taken from his lizard form into the human world. I'm glad you mentioned the USSR, right? Because you would typically associate planned economies with those communist authoritarian states. But you argue in the book, right, that actually capitalist economies are quite closely resemble right of planned economy.
So... Who's doing the planning? How does it work?
Talk us through it. That is great. That was nearly an exact quote from my book when I say something like, what's important isn't the presence or absence of planning, it's who's doing the planning, how is it being undertaken and in who's...
interests. And I think that's really important because, yeah, so, you know, just for clarity, I'm not saying there's no difference between a state socialist and a capitalist economy. Obviously, there is. But I suppose what I'm arguing is that there is this scale along which you can chart most modern economies.
You can place most modern economies on this scale between kind of pure anarchy and pure centralized control. But actually, the important thing to note as well is that that scale has... maybe at least two axes, right?
One of them concerns state planning and centralised control and the other one concerns corporate planning and centralised control. So you could have... private corporate planning and state centralized control.
So like the USSR, obviously, there was like an immense amount of centralized control by the state over the economy. Bear in mind that that centralized planning was never total. And it never can be, you know, you never have a purely planned economy, you never have a purely anarchic economy, it's very important to remember, economies are always these kind of complex systems, they never, and this is kind of, again, an insight from systems theory, which Hayek, the famous neoliberal economist, really liked.
It's the reason that he said that centralized planning was never a problem. would always kind of create all these unintended consequences because you can't ever completely control a system as complex as an economy, as complex as a society. At the same time, those systems never collapse into complete anarchy.
There's always some order, there's always some stability that emerges within those systems. So economies operate in this on the spectrum between anarchy and centralized coordination and control. And you see this today if you look at, for example, like Chinese state capitalism.
The Chinese economy is a capitalist economy. It's oriented around the production of commodities for sale and for profit. And that is an incredibly centralized economy where you have both the state and extremely powerful corporations that have an immense amount of control over people's daily lives. At the same time, the...
the state in the US is also, you know, in some ways fairly similar because you have an immense amount of corporate control over people's daily lives. You know, you have some of the largest and most powerful corporations on the planet that are centered in the US. They have a lot of them have kind of monopolistic control over their markets.
They have what's called kind of monopsony power in the labor market, which means that they're able to kind of control the market for labor. They have. immense lobbying power.
They kind of shape what happens within the state at both the kind of federal level and a more local level. They have kind of this immense ecological power to shape the future of, you know, our relationship with the climate. And, you know, they have the power to kind of avoid and evade tax, to promulgate laws, to break the law with impunity.
There's this massive issue of kind of corporate impunity where you have basically corporations allowed to break the law without any sanction whatsoever. And all of this power is exercised, as I said, with very little accountability, because these institutions have so much power within the state. So we like to think of the divide, as I've said, within our politics as one between centrally planned socialist economies on the one hand, like we had in the USSR, and then these lovely free market democratic capitalist economies on the other hand. And the US is supposed to be an exemplar of that.
But actually, if you take the kind of big superpowers that we've seen in the world economy over the last kind of 100 years, the USSR, the US and China, all of them share in common this immense centralization of power at the center among this core of, you know, state apparatchiks, heads of major companies, heads of major financial institutions. And all of them share this problem. Or, you know, if you're an elite, this, you know, this positive element, which is that the vast majority of people have no real control over what happens in their daily lives. They feel as though they have no power. Now of course what I argue in the book is that we do have power.
If we are able to organise and resist the power that is exerted upon society by these institutions, then we can begin to change things. But the world in which we live is one in which we're told you as an isolated individual have no power up against this system that is basically kind of all-encompassing. Even as you're told, oh you do have the power to kind of decide what you want to consume and decide who you want to vote for and you know you're in this like free market system where you're completely free to make those micro decisions on a daily basis. And yet the whole structure of the society in which you live has already been decided by someone else.
And as a voter, as a consumer, You have very little influence over how those decisions are made. I really want to drill into that, that feeling of powerlessness. Yeah.
I think it's so relevant, you know. That, call it capitalist realism, call it a feeling of powerlessness, I don't know, an ennui, an apathy, that essentially our inability to imagine an alternative, even though, as you write and as others have written as well, there are alternatives, there are... At risk of sounding like slightly sincere and earnest, like joyful alternatives, right, where people can find self-expression, self-realization, self-actualization. But it's almost one of the defining characteristics of the system, right, is its ability to drum out, reduce, minimize.
any idea or possibility of conceiving of something alternative than what we currently have. Yeah. And I think this problem actually comes down to something that's shifted with the transition towards neoliberalism. And so I argue in the book, right, that the neoliberals, the shift that we had in the 1980s with Thatcher, with Reagan, this idea that we needed kind of privatisation, free markets, a shrinking of the state. None of those, like the shrinking of the state didn't actually happen.
Those were all kind of ideological justifications for what was actually just a massive reassertion of the power of a big business, of finance, etc. And a crushing of the power of working people, particularly the labour movement. But you had these narratives that were like, we need privatisation, we need deregulation, and that's going to deliver free markets and promote personal freedom and autonomy, basically.
In fact, what we've seen is... in many ways, a kind of expansion of the power of the state and an expansion of corporate power alongside that. Often we see kind of state power wielded through the private sector as well.
I use some examples in the book like, you know, G4S, McKinsey, these kind of like quasi public institutions that are often charged with just astonishing corruption or mismanagement or fraud or whatever. And they just get away with it. Sorry.
Macquarie is probably a pretty good example. Yeah, exactly. And they just get away with it because they're just so close to these public institutions. So, you know, the neoliberal shift wasn't actually about shrinking the state.
What it was about was about crushing collective power. And you see this with like the first moves that. politicians like Thatcher and Reagan undertake when they come into power. It was crush the labor movement. And there was a discourse that surrounded this as well.
So there was the physical assertion of the power of the state. There was the literal beating up of minors, the use of the police to put them in their place. But there was this ideological shift as well, which was you are not a worker.
You are not a citizen. You are a consumer. You are, you know, an entrepreneur of the self. Right.
And a lot of neoliberal policies were designed. to push this. It was like, we will allow you to buy your own house. We will privatize your pension. You will be able to take out loads of debt.
Your life will become this balance sheet of assets and liabilities, and it's up to you to manage that. If you manage it well, you will do well and you will succeed. If you manage it badly, you will fail, and that will be entirely your own fault.
And, you know, even things like the privatization of education, right? Education becomes an investment in your human capital, and it's up to you to undertake that investment and to make the best of it. So you see this ideological decimation of the collective consciousness that was really the foundation. of the post-war consensus and its replacement with this rampant toxic individualism.
And I actually think that a lot of the problems that we have in our society today, whether it's the crazy stuff that you see on social media, whether it's this sense of powerlessness, whether it's even low pay as a result of people not being able to organize, they all come back to this question of individualism. And you hear this, particularly among young people. There's a sense that when things go wrong, it's your own fault. You have no one to blame but yourself.
And I think this is really damaging people's mental health. There's this sense of deep and profound shame at not being able to compete in the same way as maybe those around you. I think this feeds the rise of the far right.
I think young men who feel that they are unable to kind of... portray the kind of alpha characteristics that are associated with like elite men, get this sense of like resentment and anger that they then kind of take out on the system as a whole. And this again comes down to this idea of like competitive individualism.
It is up to you to compete and do well. And if you can't do that, then you're a loser and a failure. And all of this comes back to this shift that was the heart of neoliberalism, which is that there's no such thing as society, which is what Thatcher said. It's all just a collection of isolated individuals competing against each other. And I mean, to illustrate what this means for our sense of our own power within the system, think about, you know, like 50, 60 years ago, if you as a worker were dissatisfied with your pay, or you know, you went home and you couldn't put food on the table, you would have gone into your workplace, chatted with your co-workers, chatted with your union rep and said, look, like, are you in the same position as me?
Because I can't afford to feed my My kids and they would have been like, yeah, you're right. OK, well, we need to do something about this. We need to go and strike and organise because our boss is exploiting us. Today, if you can't put food on the table, what do you do? You blame yourself.
You maybe go out and get a personal loan at a very high interest rate. Some people become depressed because they're like, I can't afford to feed my family. I'm a loser.
There's no sense of your, you know, collective power or indeed the way in which you are being exploited because of your position within the system. It's all. it's my fault, right? Or sometimes it's their fault, right?
It's scroungers or immigrants or whatever. It's like some problem over there. And that I think is really what is preventing us from being able to resist.
Because if people did have this greater sense of like collective agency, then, you know, we would have stronger unions, people will be organizing in their workplaces to demand higher wages, we would have tenants unions, right? People wouldn't be so easy to exploit within within the private rented sector. And we do have those, but they would be stronger.
People would be pouring out onto the streets saying, you know, we cannot afford to heat our homes. This is a failure of our political class. But instead, it's I'm a failure. I have to use a food bank, right? This like toxic individualism that has become so pervasive within our society has allowed our political class to basically get away with murder because instead of blaming them, We all blame ourselves or we blame each other.
And that is, I think, the most profound ideological shift that we've seen under neoliberalism. I'm so glad you mentioned that in the context of mental health, because I think one of the most damaging instances of this sort of toxic individualism and sort of hyper sovereignty of the individual is in sort of wellness, right? It's like rather than engaging with a systemic analysis of like, why do I feel anxious and depressed? Maybe it's because I don't have secure housing. Maybe it's because I'm low paid.
Maybe it's because I'm burdened with personal debt. And instead it's work on yourself. Yeah. Set boundaries. You know, do you actually maybe need to cut some people out of your life?
Yeah. What are you talking about? Can you talk a little bit more about the role that financial institutions played in that sort of expansion of neoliberalism, particularly in that sort of that sort of Thatcherite 80s Britain?
Yeah, totally. Yeah, I think that that example of mental health is is really good. Right. And, you know, I want to say you wouldn't see this when it comes to people's physical health. Right.
You wouldn't be like, oh, you know, it's it's your fault that you've got lung cancer because I don't know, like you're not looking after yourself. You're not. taking your daily turmeric or whatever. But actually you do now see that, right?
It's like, you know, instances of illnesses that result from, you know, social issues like air pollution or not having an adequate diet or whatever, increasingly are being blamed on individual people. So you're seeing this become more and more pervasive in every area of society. And, you know, there's obviously an ideological dimension here, as we've just discussed.
But again, coming back to this idea of like, what is Marxism? We trace back things that happen in the realm of ideas to things that happen in the realm of production, in like the economy or in politics or whatever. We don't just say, oh, suddenly everyone changed their minds, or there was a really powerful ideological movement that made everyone change their minds.
Those things are important, and these movements are spearheaded by, you know, powerful groups of people who make these arguments in the public sphere. I wouldn't be out here talking to you if I didn't think ideas were important. But I do also think that a lot of the big shifts that we see can be traced back to what happens in, you know, in politics and economics, basically.
And in the 80s, you did see this big shift towards the creation of the kind of individual like investor entrepreneur, the like the mini capitalist, basically. And that was a very self-conscious shift. Shift.
that was functional both politically and to the kind of economic transition that we saw during the 80s. So the reason it was functional politically is what we've already heard, right? If you replace a sense of collective agency among people who are part of the working class with this individualized sense of agency that's like, I own my house, I have my own pension, I care more about what the stock market is doing than the average wage share of national income because my pension is invested in that.
I care about what's going on in the housing market. And I know that basically the more freedom we give the banks, the better my pension will do and the better my house will do. So that political shift is great for the Conservative Party and ultimately forces the Labour Party to kind of adapt and shift its position to accommodate neoliberalism as well. And you get this neoliberal consensus among all the major political parties.
But there is, as you mentioned, this kind of economic underpinning to it as well. Um. And yeah, those shifts become functional. to basically the financialization of the economy as well.
I don't want to kind of get too into the nitty gritty of this, but, you know, things like pensions privatization, right? It adds to this massive pool of capital that can be played around with by the financial sector, by these huge asset managers that we now have, institutions like BlackRock, for example, which I write about. In the book, it's this institution that controls other people's money, basically, and is invested in most companies, most large companies in the world, just because, you know, it has indices that track what goes on in the stock market. And you have basically as a result of that investment power, the head of BlackRock is able to write to the corporations that BlackRock has invested in, which is basically every large corporation on earth, and say, we think you should do this. We think you should do that.
Right. That is not the way that a free market is supposed to function. A free market is supposed to be lots of little individual people putting their money into a pot.
And then the money goes to the most profitable firms because that's how the market works. It's not like these huge behemoths that are basically able to direct and plan what happens within markets. That's kind of contrary to how we're told capitalism is supposed to work. So that kind of shift towards financialization was really facilitated by things like pension privatization. And obviously...
The long boom of the 1990s, which had, I mean, it's just, it's difficult to begin to kind of categorize the shift that that move towards the kind of homeowning democracy had on our politics and our economics, right? If you think about that, like the long 1990s from the end of the first housing market crash and kind of like the early 1990s, when house prices just skyrocketed because you had the complete... unleashing of the power of finance.
Everyone could get a mortgage. It seemed like there was just this endless pool of money that was circulating around the world economy. People did buy their houses, often on the cheap through right to buy.
You suddenly created this class of asset owners who were much more identified with house prices and the performance of the stock market than they were anything else. You had just this, you know, astonishing wave of globalization as well that happened throughout the global economy. There was this incredible optimism that was among the capitalist class at this point.
Gordon Brown said, we've ended boom and bust. There were all these economists saying, we're going to liberate the poor world. The former communist countries are going to become these free market utopias.
But up to 2007, Just the kind of millenarian optimism of those who were supporting this neoliberal, financialized shift was, it was hard to argue against, right? Even for those on the left, there was the sense that, yeah, you know, fine, capitalism's kind of won, like, what can we really do other than like... End of history.
Exactly, yeah. And then you get the financial crisis and you realize that all of that was just based on not only a kind of lie, a political lie, but also just deeply unsustainable economics. and a politics which has really just like torn apart the fabric of our society. And we're living with the result of that now.
We're living with the result of the kind of the arrogance of the ideologues of capital during their heyday. And yet, because they were so successful in like shattering our sense of collective agency and our ability to imagine a different world. We haven't moved beyond that. And it's just kind of like people fiddling around the edges being like, how do we get back to before the financial crisis without the acknowledgement that there is no going back?
So to get beyond that then, and I'm struck again by your use of the word sort of power, right, in relation to this sort of untrammeled financialisation. And in the face of that, you know, these ginormous corporations, ginormous financial institutions, we have individualised, sort of atomised, fractured people in our society. So how effective is something like trade union organisation, how effective is something like an expanding sort of collective consciousness in combating and dealing with those forces? Because, I don't know, I look at Port Talbot, right? Thousands of job losses for the steel workers there.
And it connects to what we're talking about, right? Because it's not just a job loss. It is literally like the community, the sense of sort of collective pride place.
Yeah, a sense of home almost. And that collapsing has deep, deep ramifications. So in a sentence, sort of how effective is trade union organisation or similar mechanisms in confronting these incredibly powerful institutions? I think the problem that we have with organising today is that even collective institutions have been...
you know, paralysed by this sense of individualism. They've kind of been infected by individualism. So if you go back to, I write again in the book about the example of the Lucas plant.
So, you know, contrast what happened at Boeing or, you know, indeed what happened at Port Talbot with the example of the workers at Lucas Aerospace in the 1970s, their plant, well, their company was kind of under threat from rising competition from abroad. They appealed to the then Labour government saying, we want you to nationalize us. And Tony Benn, the then Minister for Trade and Industry, replied and said, we can't do that right now. You guys need to come up with a plan as to how you can save this firm yourself.
And Benn was, again, one of these big believers in democratic socialism. And so the workers were like, right, OK, what do we do? And the union representatives basically surveyed all of the workers at Lucas Aerospace and said, what do you think we should do?
How could we transform the operation of this? largely weapons manufacturer basically. And the workers came back and they said we need to transform this institution into a worker-owned, democratically run organization that produces socially useful commodities, not weapons basically. And they put together this document called the Lucas Plan which was just probably one of the most radical documents in Britain's economic history. It comprised ideas that had been put forward by workers from throughout Lucas Aerospace.
to use the tools and the skills that were then available to them to transition from the production of weapons to things like kidney dialysis machines, wind turbines, things that would be useful for society. And at the same time, these workers had said, this is how we'll manage ourselves. This will be the ownership structure of the organisation. This is the way that we'll transition to this new way of working.
It was this incredible business plan, basically, that... totally undermined the kind of the spirit of capitalism, which is that the owners own the firm, the managers manage the firm on their behalf, and the workers do as they're told. And this is all based on the idea that entrepreneurs and workers and managers are these really clever people who just know how an organization should work and are really good at telling people what to do.
And workers at Lucas Aerospace were like, no, we know exactly how this firm should be run. We know what we should be doing. We are perfectly capable of managing ourselves.
And that's why it was so much more threatening to the established order. than even the idea of nationalization. There's loads of companies that were nationalized at the time. This was something else entirely.
It threatened this idea that people need to be managed and controlled. And I think that is actually the most threatening thing that we can believe in a capitalist economy. It's that we don't need to be managed and controlled, that we have the power to govern ourselves, basically. And there are a load of really amazing examples of people doing exactly that in the book.
One of the ones that's closest to my heart, you know, we mentioned Port Talbot. There's this little town in North Wales called Blaenau-Fastiniog. which is one of these kind of left behind areas.
It's a former slate mining community. And instead of kind of, you know, allowing themselves to be consigned to this idea of like a left behind neighborhood, the people in this town got together. A few people started and they basically said, we're going to start a community enterprise to create jobs in the local area and give people a fighting chance. And as soon as people saw a couple of people do this, they were like, why can't we set up a community enterprise?
Why can't we set up a community-owned energy company that will provide us with cheap energy instead of, you know, paying tons of money to these, you know, privatized utility companies when there's hydroelectric power that's being, you know, monopolized by this corporation that's extracting all the wealth from this community. We could actually just generate our own power ourselves. And suddenly you had all of these community enterprises springing up, just this incredible ethos of self-help. There was some support through something called the Communities First programme by the Welsh Government.
But largely speaking, this was people just being like, we don't have to accept things being this way. You see a similar sort of thing in Preston, for example, where you have the community wealth building agenda, the council is supporting the creation of cooperatives, democratic local banking, all these different things. the participatory budgeting movement that's spread around the world where, you know, residents are given the power to determine how their municipal budget is spent. The evidence is just so, so clear that when people start to believe that they have the power to be able to govern themselves, to be able to make decisions about their communities, about their workplaces, they take that power and they wield it in service of the collective, of their community, of, you know, the people around them.
They basically use it to build socialism. And the biggest thing standing in the way of our getting from here to there is just this pervasive and widespread belief that I am on my own. There's nothing I can do. The powers that are united against me are too strong. And, you know, no one else wants to work with me to change things.
Which is actually why I believe, you know, I'm not saying that like all these small individual examples of like the resistance to capitalism or neoliberalism are going to be enough to shift the nature of the whole system. What I am saying is the biggest thing standing between us and progressive change is basically individualism. And these examples of people working together to resist their exploitation, to build better communities, they just shatter individualism.
You go to these communities and people do not share this like individualistic competitive mindset. They have, you know, their own personal dreams and aspirations and wants and a secure sense of their own self. But they also view their identity as tied to what happens to the people around them.
I'm really struck by. These examples of what a better future possibly looks like, within the context of what you said earlier about our political paradigm, that there is essentially, basically a binary, right, about the size of the state and the size of welfare. So how do you see that better future? future sitting within something that kind of, I guess you could call technocratic governance, right?
The sort of the managerialism of Prime Minister Sunak or likely a Prime Minister Starmer. Yeah, I mean, it just means democratising everything, like just demanding more, more power being handed down to whether that's, you know, local communities, whether it's, you know, devolution and decentralisation, whether it's demanding workers are able to take power within their organisations. You know, the removal of the massive restrictions that have been placed on our rights to do things like protest and assemble and speak out against, you know, the horrors that are being committed by our government here and all over the world.
It really requires like a reinvigoration at the political level. When we think about politics, a reinvigoration of the idea of democracy. basically. Now we live in a country where the kind of liberal democratic revolution of the kind that we saw during the 1800s, that hasn't even been completed.
We've still got a monarchy. We've still got an unelected chamber in the House of Lords. We still have a private corporation that runs the heart of our financial sector, the City of London Corporation, which is a private corporation in the guise of a public local authority.
So we have all these hangovers from the feudal era. undermine democratic processes. And on top of that, we have these neoliberal shifts that have aimed to insulate even more areas of the state from democratic accountability. So, you know, we have like the Bank of England being made independent, i.e. not subject to democratic scrutiny, which means that its decisions are much more likely to be influenced by the financial sector that has the ear of bank officials than they are the preferences of ordinary people.
You have just the outsourcing of huge swathes of public services to private corporations that you cannot really control. You cannot really hold accountable. They're supposed to be held accountable by the government. But the people who write the contracts according to which these services are procured also consult for the firms that are bidding for those contracts. It's this kind of revolving door of corporate power that connects like public sector institutions with private sector.
um outsourcing organizations there's no real democratic accountability there you've seen a massive centralization of power you know when thatcher came to power she smashed the glc um the guy who was instrumental in putting together the lucas plan after he was fired from lucas for union organizing went to work for the glc the greater london corporation um which uh was then kind of sponsoring um these ideas around how you could make democratic planning a reality, how you could start to bring the ideas that we saw at Lucas Aerospace to the public sector. That actually crushed the GLC precisely because it was doing some of that interesting experimentation. We're seeing, again, this kind of revival of that type of movement around democratic planning in places like Preston.
And that's why places like Preston are seen as so threatening to the status quo. It's why we haven't seen what should be like. I spoke to a conservative the other day who said that community wealth building should be a conservative policy. It should be handing power back to communities.
But they can't, you know, accept the idea that that would happen because it runs contrary to this spirit of hierarchy that is really what underpins capitalism. So, yeah, like that shift towards community power and towards worker power and people power is so deeply threatening to the status quo. And it really requires us. to just like, yes, kind of combat this mindset of individualism and also just like resist.
It becomes so hard to think about, you know, Destructive ways of resisting in the system that we have all we can do is we kind of go online and we maybe like fire on off an angry tweet every now and again Because we look at the system and it seems so broken but actually if you're able to kind of get offline and get into spaces where people are Organizing with tenants to like prevent rogue landlords organizing with migrants to support them To fight for their rights, you know, just protesting on the street getting out and you know making your voice heard to the political class. All of these forms of resistance are, you know, yes, they're reactive, but they're also constructive because you start to build these bonds and these subjectivities that allow us to think beyond this, like, toxic individualism and hierarchy that, you know... makes up our current system.
It's really interesting because my inclination is to compare us as the two main possible political vehicles for government in this country as technocratic organisations particularly under Labour and Kirstein at the moment. then talking about street politics, participatory street politics. And I'm admittedly I'm thinking about this now, so I don't know if it'll stand up to particularly much scrutiny.
But in light of the shenanigans that are going on in Parliament right now, I mean, there may well be a different Speaker of the House of Commons by the time this airs. So let's park that for the time. time being. But the Labour Party's position on Gaza, and I'm not trying to talk about Gaza, I want to talk about street politics here, it's changed. It's moved.
It's gone from the permission of Israel to impose collective punishment on Gaza, to calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. And I think you, I want to think, I want to think that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have turned out on the streets of London, weekend after weekend, has made some kind of difference to that. Maybe I'm being naive.
I think it's more to do with the the fact that the American state's position is slightly marginally shifting as a result of the utter chaos that's going to be unleashed as a result of this conflict and that Britain basically follows tail between its legs everything that happens you know we have effectively no independent foreign policy we just kind of follow mindlessly what's going on in the US but having said that part of the reason that the situation is becoming so untenable over there and over here is because people are refusing As you say, to just accept the mainstream narrative as to what's going on. I know so many people, and I think this is a widespread feeling when it comes to particularly what's going on at the moment in Gaza. You go online and you see just the raw footage that's being posted of people's limbs being blown off by weapons that are being sold to the Israeli state by our government. And then you look at the news and it's... just the same propaganda that's being repeated over and over again, barely any mention of the actual state of affairs on the ground in Palestine.
Very rarely do you see a Palestinian voice out there advocating for their people. Even when we had the ruling in the ICJ, that was barely covered on the day that we heard evidence against Israel. And I think that creates this sense of unreality, right? I've heard so many people say, it feels like I'm going insane.
Because you see what is happening. And then you go to institutions that you kind of think that you should broadly trust to tell you the truth. And you see things are one-sided or ignored or just like kind of skewed. And then you start to think, well, where else is this happening? And it's not obviously just happening in...
in Gaza at the moment, like last year and for a long time now, we've been seeing basically a genocide that's been happening in Ethiopia and Tigray. No reporting on that because it doesn't meet the foreign policy objectives of the British state for people to know about that. Same thing is happening in Sudan or in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There are all these conflicts that we just don't hear about. Instead, we hear constantly endless coverage about what's going on in Ukraine because it meets the foreign policy objectives of the British state.
for people to know that Russia is doing objectively horrible things. But there are lots of other governments around the world that are doing objectively horrible things, including our own. Many governments being funded by the British government, being provided arms by the British government, that are also doing horrible things.
And yet we hear nothing about that because it doesn't meet the foreign policy objectives of the British state. And I think this really comes down to a question of like, you know, I don't think that the presenters on the BBC are like deliberately skewing. the output that they put out there. What I do think is that how is the news agenda formed?
Like how is the news reported? It's reported based on what happens in the papers, right? There's always a paper review. What determines what goes in the papers? Well, these are literally owned by like oligarchs and like massive corporations that just exist to promote their own interests.
Or it is determined by what politicians say. So politicians in many ways kind of shape the news agenda. I remember talking to a presenter not that long ago who was like, well, if you want this item to be on the news agenda, then you need to get Keir Starmer to say something about it because otherwise we can't report on it.
It's not news. Like that wouldn't be kind of objective. So when you have this, you know, narrowing of the political agenda among the two biggest political parties, the news follows and it creates this air of unreality because you're like, why aren't we hearing about some of the biggest, most important issues.
If you want to move away from questions around conflict, why aren't we hearing about the fact much more frequently that last year was potentially the warmest year on record? Maybe we're starting to see breaching the Paris Agreement about 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. These massive, massive issues that literally determine whether or not people live or die, that determine the future of humanity, we don't see them being covered because of this just like insulation like of uh of our political class from democratic accountability and the way that we have seen that begin to shift is when people get out onto the streets you know when you do have a protest that is big enough we saw this i remember actually i think it was during the 2019 election campaign suddenly climate became an issue like it almost kind of it didn't come out of nowhere but it felt like it came out of nowhere because these people were pouring onto the streets and saying we demand action on this right um and I think it is interesting seeing how public opinion and the news agenda can begin to shift when you do actually get people organising to demand a different way of doing politics.
It's really interesting to hear you say that because the way the British... political media has covered the environment recently is basically in the context of whether or not labor is going to spend 28 billion pounds of capitalization on it rather and then it becomes kind of a yeah westminster political story yeah about to what extent labor is going to borrow to invest which can be a high-minded one if it's had the right way i don't think it is rather than is the price of the future ecological viability of the planet 28 billion pounds yeah and the people who would use job it will say well it's not my job to report on that that's up to climate scientists or whatever and it's like well what is the point in the news if it's literally just telling us like the shenanigans and the gossip of these just like closed-minded half of them are corrupt politicians that are like swanning around westminster being like well you know I am completely in control of this democracy and everyone else will do what I tell them to do. Like, it's just, this is why it's actually so good to have such a growing and vibrant alternative media in this country. Because I do think, you know, that juxtaposition I was talking about between what you see online and what you see in the news is pushing people away from those mainstream sources and actually encouraging people to get their analysis and the depth of the analysis that they want places like here.
for example. And of our attribute where I work. Absolutely.
Yeah, very much so. Last question for you, and I'll try and leave it on a slightly more optimistic note. You write in the book, since Thatcher, political debate has failed to break out of a sterile dichotomy. Those on the left argue for higher public spending funded by taxes on the rich.
Those on the right argue for cuts to public spending in tax. When we accede to the idea that politics is a battle between the state and the market, we play into the hands of the right. So what should the left be presenting as an argument or as a belief system to try and transcend that dichotomy? I think I after that talk about how we need to be presenting the idea of socialism, not as a project of protection, but as a project of collective empowerment.
So it's not about going to people and saying, you know, businesses have been mean, so hand more power to me, a politician, and I'm going to save you. Or indeed, politicians have been mean, hand more power to me, another politician, and I'll do things differently, right? It's about demanding that the people who are in charge actually respect.
the people that they're supposed to govern enough to give them the power to shape the conditions of their lives. And what does that mean in practice? It means...
just halting this extraordinary assault on the labour movement, which by the way, the Labour Party is now considering rowing back on the one little tiny thing it has left, which is these promises on workers'rights, which are barely even enough to begin with. So like really just demanding the end of the assault on workers'rights and like a strong assertion of the right to unionise and collective bargaining and all these different sorts of things. That is a key pillar of democracy. It is about demanding an end to the astonishingly draconian rules against protest.
You know, we've seen environmentalists being jailed for trying to bring attention to the fact that we are destroying the planet. And, you know, we know that the Conservative government has pushed loads of just... Talk about free speech, right?
And like freedom of assembly and all these democratic rights. And they're just constantly riding roughshod over just like the most basic democratic principles. It is about, you know, like supporting community organising, about kind of decentralisation and allowing local people to take power within their local communities. And it is about kind of also a wider spread democratisation of the public sector of our politics.
That means that when we have to think about how we run our public services, rather than saying we're going to outsource running of our health system and social care system to Capita, a giant multinational corporation that is literally skimming money out of the pockets of taxpayers and sucking it up into those of shareholders. Why couldn't we have a democratically run public health care system or public services system? There's a really interesting example at the end of the book about Chile when Salvador Allende came to power.
And obviously he was just like, you know, destroyed by the United States for pushing this model of democratic socialism. He said he didn't want to go for Soviet style centralization, nor did he want to go for kind of for capitalism. And instead he pushed this market, this model of democratic socialism, which was extraordinarily popular.
And one pillar of that was how can we organize health care? based on existing community networks and allowing workers and patients and people within that system a voice as to how they were being treated. There's a completely different model. It requires a complete rethink as to how we imagine the relationship between government and governed. You know, in an ideal liberal political philosophy, government is supposed to be a representation of our collective power.
It's supposed to be the mechanism through which we all govern ourselves. You know, the liberal theorists were like, we were in the state of nature and everyone was attacking each other. So we all came together and decided to form a state. That's obviously not what happened.
But like arguably the true realization of the liberal dream is when government can actually become a mechanism through which we are all able to govern ourselves collectively. come together to make decisions about the future of our society amongst ourselves, rather than electing people who tell us what to do. Grace Blakely, it's been an utter pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Vulture Capitalism in all good bookshops.
Thank you. Thank you.