How capitalism enslaved us all | Grace Blakeley interview

the ne liberal 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 there was the literal beating up of miners the use of the police to um 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 um 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 Blakeley hello hi how's it going good thanks how are you very well very glad to have you here in the studio yes great to have you here um we're talking because of this weighty tone vulture capitalism corporate crimes backd door 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 don't know who you are how would you like to introduce yourself um so I'm Grace Blakeley I am a writer I write about political economy um this is my latest book I've also got available in all good book stores um I'm also a staff writer for Tribune magazine um and I uh do bits and pieces in the media nice okay 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 this loss of Freedom yeah or 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 um I think you know we are fed this line that we live in this this free market democratic system right and that that's what capitalism is capitalism means free markets and democracy um and the um the kind of incursion of the state into the economy limits freedom and creates this problem of big government and that results in this um 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 um less government and other people saying we need like more government Less Market um and I just think that 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 uh when straight into um the uh the everything that was going on around around Co and I started being asked like on you know mainstream TV questions like oh well you know the government's spending loads of money this is basically Corbin ISM this is what you wanted you 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 Co it was basically the government funneling money into massive corporations to landlords uh into you know the financial system and somehow we're led to believe that that is socialism 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 um you know most of the time the state is acting to defend the interests of big business and big business is working within the state and alongside the state to um 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 um I think you know uh there's so much misunderstanding as to what that means as well um and I kind of start the book by looking at these these two quotes one is from Marx which is about him saying you know the worker is um treated as a kind of a bee under capitalism where they just kind of follow orders and and kind of buzz around the hive whereas actually their Architects they learn to kind of create they they kind of yearn to create worlds in their head and and bring those into being with their hands and I contrast that with the kind of the quote from this uh 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 and actually even canes and and most of the big thinkers that we hold up in our poit 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 areen 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 uh risk of asking an absurdly broad question but seeing as you just said 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 some truth to that to that sort of ism if you like that that style of thought that that method of political analysis yeah totally um so as a kind of way of understanding capitalism it's um as you say kind of mode of analysis that begins by looking at the way that we produce things as a society so rather than say looking at like the prevailing ideas within a society and saying you know history is driven forward by these great battles between um different you know groups of ideologies or different um 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 um about capitalism is that it is a social system that rests upon the fact 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 labor power for a living um so just as an example you know there's a different 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 um 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 um and that that is undertaken through this class division the social division of labor where um 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 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 um because you know the other way of looking at capitalism is as I've said that it's a system based on you know private property and free markets basically and then you have these ideas that um 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 um most of the major industries within the world economy are dominated by one or two firms that are deeply corrupt and like in the pockets of of of of politicians and vice versa so I start with the example of Boeing right which has been in the news recently for the the doors blowing off its planes um at you know about 13,000 feet in the air this comes on the back of these um crashes that took place several years ago now where over 350 people died in two separate crashes where Boeing planes just nose dived out of the air I won't give you all the Gory details but suffice to say people are Boe new about the flaws in this plane um before it was um put on the market they deleted um 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 uh planes did crash they tried to blame the pilots the FAA the regulator basically did nothing um and throughout all of this the American state was channeling billions of dollars worth of tax um cuts and subsidies into uh into Boeing and I think what that shows is that this argument that you know let's say this this problem with Boeing right it show 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 um and it's because capitalism is the 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 is actually to say how do we hand power how do we pull power down so how could workers within Boeing have organized to resist both their exploitation and the kind of Corruption of this company and there's another example of the book in the book I look out of the lucast plan where workers in an aerospace company in the UK did just that did just that they kind of organized to take try and take control of the firm the audio recordings between the pilots Union and Boeing are extraordinary to listen to Yes um okay I was going to ask you about planned economies which are typically associated with Communism but see as you mentioned feudalism I just want to at risk of taking us on a tangent already but why not um we had yianis far Fus in here a couple of months ago talking about techn feudalism right and this idea that actually we're past capitalism now and what our modern economic model it actually far more closely resembles feudalism than a lot of people would like to believe um that these sort of the 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 and I appreciate I have yeah I have I um I really like yanis I uh interviewed him for his book or actually a couple of months ago um 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 um and you get you see a lot of this stuff in kind of progressive um economics where you get critiques of the way that the economy works from people who say well this isn't real capitalism you know they say like for example uh the 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 um 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 labor otherwise the system loses legitimacy but the actual functioning of production in a capitalist system centers far more on stuff that happens within massive monopolistic corporations um 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 um where this was like this massive joint venture between um some you know wealthy and powerful people who gained the right to create this big corporate entity um and the British state in pursuit of Imperial power um 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 um and yeah this was a big part of the development of of British capitalism the East India Company Adam Smith called it a strange absurdity he said it was a state in the dis of a merchant and all the kind of original theorists of 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 the AIC itself were Central to the development of this uh of the capitalist system across the world so there isn't this clean distinction between um you know uh corporate power and um and kind of free market capitalism those two things go hand in hand the Anarchy by William Del rles are really interesting study on the East India Company um great there's a there's a I've forgotten the name of it now but there's a 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 and so if you look at capitalism and you say well modern capitalism is defined by financialization 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 exactly of it yeah no completely um and I think there is you can start by looking at the outcomes of course and that is important um and saying the uh that capitalism kind of isn't working in the way it's supposed to uh it it kind of hearkens back to people who are like oh well um you know the like State socialism practiced in the USSR isn't real State socialism um and uh 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 it's kind of a non-argument isn't it really it's like capitalism could 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 ve into like um 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 uh you know weird kind of lizard people or whatever I'm not up to date with all the latest conspiracy the up to dat today I I think that one's still floating around um there's some great great YouTube videos where like there's like a GL or something of like a royal and people like that was him shape shifting he's just taken from his lizard form into the human world um 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 a 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 the my book when I say something like uh what's important isn't the presence or absence of planning it's who's doing the planning how has it being undertaken and in whose interests and I think that's really important because um yeah so you know just for clarity I'm not saying there's no difference between a state socialist in a capitalist economy obviously there is um but I suppose what I'm arguing is that there is this scale um uh along which you can chart most modern economies you can place most modern economies on this scale uh between kind of pure Anarchy and pure centralized control um but actually the important thing to note as well is that scale has maybe at least two axes right one of them control concerns State planning and centralized control and the other one concerns corporate planning and centralized control um so you could have um uh you know private corporate planning and state centralized control um so like the USSR obviously there was like an immense amount of um 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 hyek the famous neoliberal economist really liked it's the reason that he said that centralized planning would always um 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 economy operate in this on this spectrum between um Anarchy and and and uh and centralized coordination and control um and you see this uh today if you look at for example like Chinese State capitalism the Chinese economy is a capitalist economy um it's oriented around like the production of commodities for um for sale uh and um and for profit and uh that is an incredibly centralized economy where you have both the state and extr 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 um you know you have some of the like largest and most powerful corporations on the planet that are centered in the US um they have you a lot of them have kind of monopolistic control over their markets uh 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 um they have immense lobbying power they kind of shape what happens um within the state at both the kind of federal level and a um a more local level um they have kind of this immense ecological power to shape the future of you know our relationship with the climate um 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 with without any sanction whatsoever um and uh all of this power is exercised as I said with very little accountability because these institutions have so much power within the state um so you know we like to think of the Divide as I've said within our Politics As One between as one between kind of you know um centrally planned socialist economies on the one hand like we had in the USSR and then these lovely free market Democratic um 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 hundred 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 um you know State appara chics um heads of major companies heads of major Financial 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 um 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 organize and resist the power that is exerted um upon you know 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 the system is basically kind of all-encompassing um 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 um you know you're in this like free market system where you're completely free to to 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 I really want to drill into that that feeling of power I think it's relevant you know that call it capitalist realism um call it a feeling of p i don't know an onwe 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 um 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 minimalize 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 um that's shifted with the transition towards neoliberalism so I argue in the book right the the neoliberals the shift that we had in the 1980s with Thatcher with Reagan this idea that we needed kind of privatization free markets a shrinking of the state none of those like the the shrinking of the state didn't actually happen um those were all kind of ideological justifications for what was actually just a massive reassertion of the power of um of big business of Finance Etc um and a a crushing of the power of of working people particularly the labor movement um but you had these narratives that were like we need privatization we need deregulation and that's going to deliver free markets and promote personal freedom and autonomy basically um 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 McKenzie these kind of like quazi um public institutions that are often charged with just astonishing corruption or mismanagement or fraud or whatever and they just get away with it sorry mcar is probably a pretty good example yeah exactly um and they just get away with it because they're just so close to uh to these public institutions um so you know that that the neoliberal shift wasn't actually about shrinking the state what it was about was about crushing Collective power and you see this um with like the first moves that politicians like that and Reagan undertake when they come into power it was crushed the labor movement and there was a a discourse that surrounded this 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 um 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 um you know an entrepreneur of the self right and a lot of NE liberal 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 um and uh 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 make the best of it so you see this like this um ideological uh decimation of the collective Consciousness that was really the foundation of like the post-war consensus um 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 like you know the crazy stuff that you see on social media um whether it's this sense of powerlessness um whether it's even like you know 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 like damaging people's mental health um there's this sense of like deep and profound shame at not being able to compete in the same way as maybe those around you um I think this feeds the rise of the far right I think young men who are feel that they are unable to kind of portray the kind of alpha characteristics that are associated with like Elite men um 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 that 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 the 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 chatt with your union rep and said look like a are you in the same position as me cuz I can't afford to feed my kids and they would have been like yeah you're right okay well we need to do something about this we need to go on strike and organize 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 Fe my family I'm a loser there's no sense of your you know Collective um 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 scers or imigrants or whatever it's like some problem over there um and that I think is really what is preventing us from being able to to resist because if people did have this greater sense of like Collective agency then you know we would have stronger unions people would be organizing in their workplaces to demand higher wages um we would have tenants unions right people wouldn't be so easy to exploit within within the private rented SE sector and they we know we do have those but they would be 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 um 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 um toxic individualism and and sort of hyp sovereignty of the individual 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 work on yourself yeah set boundaries you know do do you need do you do you actually maybe need to um to cut some people out of your life like what are you talking about um 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 um that sort of thatcherite 80s Britain yeah totally um yeah I think that that example of mental health is is really good right and I 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 termeric or whatever um but actually you do now see that right it's like you know instances of of illnesses um 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 um 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 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 um 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 um what happens in you know in politics and economics basically and in the 80s um you did see this big shift towards the creation of the kind of individual like investor entrepreneur the like the mini capitalist basically um and that was a very self-conscious I shift um that was functional both politically and to the the kind of economic transition that we saw during the 80s um so the reason it was functional politically is is what we've already heard right um if you replace a sense of collective agency among people who are part of you know 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 pensions invested 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 my you know my house will do um so that political shift is is great for the conservative party and ultimately for forces the labor party to kind of adapt and shift its position to accommodate neoliberalism as well um 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 and yeah th those shifts become functional to basically the financialization of the economy as well um I don't want to kind of get too into the the nitty-gritty of this but you know things like pensions privatization right um 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 black rock for example um which I write about in the book it's this institution that controls other people's money basically um and is invested in most companies most large companies in the world just because you know it has IND indices that track what goes on in the stock market and you have basically as a result of that investment power the head of black rock is able to write to the corporations that he that blackha 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 um to what we're told how we're told capitalism is supposed to work uh so that kind of shift towards financialization was really facilitated by um yeah things like pensions 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 home owning 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 in 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 um it seemed like there was just this endless pool of money that was C culating around the world economy people did you know 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 you know house prices and and the performance of the stock market than they were or anything else um you had uh just this you know astonishing wave of globalization as well that happened throughout the global economy um and there was this this like incredible optimism that was among the kind of the cap capitalist class at this point they Gordon Brown said We've Ended boom and bust there are all these economists saying we're going to liberate the poor World um you know the former um uh communist countries are going to become you know these free market Utopias um that like up to 2007 just the kind of millenarian like optimism of those who were supporting this like 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 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 um 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 ideals of capital um during 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 financialization and in the face of that you know these ginormous corporations ginormous financial institutions we have individualized sort of atomized fractured people in our society so how effective is something like Trade union organization how effective is something like an expanding sort of collective Consciousness in combating and and dealing with those forces because I don't know I look at Port Albert right thousands of job losses yeah um for the steel workers there and it and it and I'm 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 um sort of collective Pride place a s yeah a sense of home almost and that collapsing has deep deep ramifications so in a sentence sort of how effective is Trade union organization or or similar mechanisms in confronting these incredibly powerful institutions I think the problem that we have with organizing today is that even Collective institutions have been um you know Paralyzed by this sense of individualism they've kind of been infected by individualism um so if you go back to I write in again in the book um about the example of the Lucas plan so you know contrast what happened at Boeing or you know indeed what happened at Port Talbert with the example of the workers at Lucas ARA space in 1970s their plant well their company was kind of under threat from rising competition from abroad they appealed to the then labor government saying we want you to nationalize us and Tony Ben and 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 Ben was again one of these big Believers in Democratic socialism um and so the workers were like right okay what do we do and the union Representatives um 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 this um um 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 um it comprised ideas that had been put forward by workers from throughout Lucas era base to use the tool tools and the skills that were then available to them to transition from the production of weapons to things like kidney di 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 organization this is the way that we'll transition to this new way of working it was this incredible um business plan basically uh that totally undermined the kind of the spirit of capitalism which is the 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 of 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 Aras space 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 the 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 um and there are a load of really amazing examples of people doing exactly that in the book um one of the ones that's closest to my heart you know we mentioned Port Talbert there's this little town in North Wales called Blind itino um which is one of these kind of Left Behind areas it's a former late mining Community um and uh 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 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 owner Energy company that will provide us with cheap energy instead of you know paying tons of money um to these you know privatized utility companies when there's Hydro El electric power that's being you know monopolized by this Corporation um 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 community's first program by the Welsh government but largely speaking this was people just being like we don't have to accept things being this way um you see a similar sort of thing in in Preston for example where you have the community wealth building agenda the council is supporting the creation of cooperatives um Democratic local banking all these different things the participatory budgeting movement that's spread around the world where um 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 the collective of their community of you know the people around them they basically use it to build socialism um 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 um 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 um 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 you know 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 like what a better future possibly looks like within the context of what you said earlier about our political Paradigm that there is essentially a basically a binary right about the size of the state and the size and the size of welfare so how do you see that better future sitting within something that kind of I guess you could call technocratic governance right the the sort of the managerialism of prime minister sunak or likely a prime minister starma yeah I mean it just means democratizing everything like just demanding more more power being being handed down to whether that's you know local communities um whether it's you know Devolution and decentralization whether it's demanding workers are able to take power within their organizations um you know the uh removal of the just massive restrictions that have been placed on our rights to do things like protest and assemble and and speak out against um you know the horrors that are being committed by our government here and all over the world um it really requires like a reinvigoration at the political level when we're thinking about politics a reinvigoration of the idea of of democracy basically now we live in a country where the kind of liberal Democratic revolution of the kind that you know 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 you know the heart of our financial sector the city of London corporation which is a private uh qu private Corporation in the in the guise of a public local Authority so we have all these these hangovers from the feudal era that um undermine democratic processes and on top of that we have these these neoliberal shifts that have aimed to insulate even more areas of the state from democratic um accountability so you know we have like the bank of England being made independent I.E um not subject to democratic scrutiny which means that its decisions are much more likely to be influenced by the you know financial sector that has the air of Bank officials than they are the preferences of of ordinary people um you have just uh the Outsourcing of huge suedes of Public Services to private corporations that you know 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 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 in uh 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 AIS bace to the public sector thata 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 like places like Preston has seen as so threatening to the status quo it's why we haven't seen what should be like I I I I spoke to a 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 they can't um you know accept the idea that that would happen because it runs contrary to this spirit of hierarchy that is really what underpins capitalism um so yeah like that that shift towards Community power and towards worker power um and people power is so deeply threatening to the status quo um and it really requires us to just like yes kind of combat this mindset of individualism and also just like resist it's it becomes so hard to think about um uh you know constructive 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 um 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 um uh to fight for their rights uh you know just protesting on the street getting out you know um making your your voice heard uh to the political class all of these forms of resistance are you know are 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 um and hierarchy that that you know um makes up our current system that's really interesting because my inclination is to to compare our sort of the two main possible political vehicles for government in this country as technocratic organizations particularly under labor under K arm at the moment but just hearing you then talking about Street politics participatory Street politics and I 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 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 is so let's let's park that for the 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 um impose Collective punishment on Gaza to calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and I think you I want to think that 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 fact that the American states position is slightly marginally shifting as a result of the utter chaos that's going to be under leash as a result of this conflict and that Britain basically follows tail between its legs everything that happen you know we have effectively no independent foreign policy we just kind of follow mindlessly what's going on um 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 like 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 um and then you look at the news and it's just you know the same propaganda that's being repeated over and over again barely any mention of like the actual State of Affairs on the ground in Palestine very rarely do you see a Palestinian voice out there kind of advocating um for uh for their people um and you know even when we had like the ruling in the icj that was like barely covered right on the on the day that we we heard evidence um uh against against Israel um and I think that creates this sense of unreality right I 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 um 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 um and for a long time now we've been seeing basically a genocide that's been happening happening in Ethiopia and T no reporting on that because it doesn't meet the you know foreign policy objectives of the British state for people to know about that same thing in what's happening in Sudan or in the Democratic Republic of Congo there are all these conflicts um 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 States 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 um a question of like you know I don't think that the presenters on the BBC are like deliberately skewing the 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 um 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 Kama 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 um you know narrowing of the political agenda among the two biggest political parties it the news follows and it creates the of unreality because you're like why aren't we hearing about some of the biggest like most important issues if you want to move away from you know questions around conflict why aren't we hearing about the fact much more frequently that like last year was you know potentially the the warmest year on record maybe we're starting to see um breaching the Paris agreements about 1.5 degrees above uh pre-industrial levels like 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 um 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 you know I think it is interesting seeing how public opinion and the News agenda can begin to shift when you do actually get people organizing um to uh to demand a different way of doing politics it's really interesting to hear you say that because the sort of 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 about to what extent labor is going to to borrow to invest which can be a high-minded one if it's had in the right way I don't think it is rather than is the price of the future ecological viability of the planet 28 billion pound yeah and the people who are us job is it will say well it's not my job to report on that that's to climate scientist 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 SW 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 a growing and vibrant alternative media in this country U because I do think you know that that J position I 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 andar and where I work absolutely yeah very much so um last question for you and I'll try and leave it on a slightly more optimistic note yeah uh you write in the book since thater 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 that dichotomy I think I after that um talk about how uh 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 can 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 um just halting this extraordinary assault on the labor movement which by the way the labor party is now considering rowing back on the one little tiny thing it has left which is these um promises on workers rights which are barely even enough to begin with um so like really just demanding um the end of The Assault on on workers rights and like a strong assertion of the right to unionize and collective bargaining and all the sorts of different sorts of things that is a key pillar of democracy um 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 um we are destroying the planet um and you know we know that the conservative government has pushed loads of uh just we talk they talk about Free Speech right and like freedom of assembly and all these Democratic rights and they're just constantly riding rough shot over just like the most basic Democratic principles um it is about you know um like supporting Community organizing about kind of decentralization and allowing local people to take power within their local communities um and it is about kind of also what wider spread democratization of the public sector of our politics that means that when we have to think about how we run a public services run our Public Services rather than saying we're going to Outsource running of our health system and social care system to capit a giant multinational corporation that is literally skimming money out of the pockets of taxpayers and sucking up into those of shareholders why couldn't we have a democratically um run public uh Healthcare System system or public services system and there's a really interesting example at the end of the book about Chile um when Salvador ende came to power um 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 um for for for capitalism um 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 healthc care based on existing Community networks and um allowing like workers and uh and patients and people within that system of voice as to how they were being treated right there's a completely different model it's just it requires like a 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 um 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 where we come together to make decisions about the future of our society amongst ourselves rather than electing people who tell us what to do Grace Blakeley it's has been an utter pleasure thank you so much for your time thought capitalism in all good bookshops thank you thank you

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 191,373

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, news, breaking news, conversation, politics news, politicsjoe, joe songs, boris johnson song, boris johnson speech, keir starmer song, keir starmer speech, new media, novara, rishi sunak, labour party, conservative, tory party, conservatism, brexit, neoliberalism interview, why capitalism doesn't work, socialist economics, cost of living crisis, economist interview, political news

Id: CLPGrdRid7Y

Length: 57min 50sec (3470 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 07 2024